Subject:
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My letter to Lego, and it could be yours too!
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lugnet.color
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Date:
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Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:09:25 GMT
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Hey all,
Well, after setting the roof on fire with my last post, I thought I'd try to
pour a little water on the flames by collecting my thoughts together into a
letter to the company. Those of you who read and agree with it, please feel
free to copy it and make any deletions or additions you feel necessary and
send off your own to the address below. I'd also love to know about any
grammatical or typographical errors you may find. I've been fine-tuning
this letter for about a week, and you know how you can miss things when
you've re-read them enough times!
Lego Systems Inc.
Consumer Services
P.O. Box 1138
Enfield, CT 06083-1138
My letter is as follows:
Dear Lego Company,
I am writing to you with sad news on my part. I have been a huge fan of
your product ever since my parents brought home the Enviro-Model #585 Police
Headquarters back in 1976. For almost thirty years, Lego has been my
primary hobby and has given me countless hours of fun, fascination, and
fantastic flights of fancy. However, I've now decided that I can no longer
purchase your product or endorse your company because of several recent
changes that I believe have hurt the Lego brand and severely undermined it's
integrity and quality. I've weathered many changes to the product over the
years because most of them didn't have the same severity of impact as the
ones that I've seen recently. These changes have compelled me for the first
time to compose a letter so that I can more directly and appropriately
convey my feelings. This letter is long but I beg you to read my points
through and take them into consideration. Granted, there are more
complaints listed below than compliments but remember that they come from a
long-times fan's love for the product.
The color change is my first grievance. As you can see from the enclosed
picture, I have quite a large collection, bordering on 200,000 pieces. The
color change has rendered a significant portion of it obsolete. Of course I
can still use all the pieces in my collection, but at least as far as these
colors are concerned, I can now no longer mix the new with the old. One of
the primary reasons I had been such a long-standing customer is because I
knew that the pieces that I had in my collection that were from the 50's
would match pieces from the 90's just as if they'd both been made at the
same time. I especially don't appreciate the fact that I now have only two
choices if I want to continue to purchase new sets: either I'll have to
begin to sort two very slightly different shades of three different colors
into my collection, or I'll have to get rid of all my old colors and replace
them with the new ones. Neither choice is attractive or financially
feasible, especially since many of the pieces in the old colors will most
likely never be seen again. Backward compatibility, one of the pillars of
strength of the Lego brand from the very beginning, has been rendered null
and void.
When I first heard of the color change, I was shocked and very upset. I'm
still very upset because the explanations for this change (which are varied
and appear to have come from several different sources) have not made sense
to me nor convinced me that it was the right thing to do. What was
especially upsetting was that you chose not call attention to this change at
all. There were no ads in the catalogs, no notice on your website, and no
press release of any kind. Not a single word. If you're so sure that this
change was the right thing to do, why not say so? Aren't you proud of it,
and don't you think that your customers deserve to know that a change of
this magnitude is coming? Why the secrecy?
I've even heard that the reason brown was changed was because there was some
environmental issue involved with the production of the original color.
Being a person who is concerned about and supports environmental
conservation, I would completely and happily support such a change if it
were for this reason. It's even been speculated that the new colors are
less costly to produce. This would be another reasoning that I could
support. Lower manufacturing costs hopefully would mean lower costs to the
consumer, another scenario that I could wholeheartedly embrace.
First I heard that you made no announcements about the change because you
didn't think your customers would notice the difference. Well, if you didn'
t think anyone would notice, why change the colors in the first place?!
Nothing was "broken." Why try to fix it? Have you actually ever received
any complaints about the colors that were changed? Then I heard that the
official reason was that the change was made to bring the entire color range
into balance with itself. Now I am not a color scientist, and I'd be
willing to bet that the vast majority of your target market isn't either.
You might think that it's the best way to go, but are the children who
comprise the bulk of your target market going to pick up on this? Somehow I
doubt that a six-year old is going to buy a new set, take it home, open the
box, look at the new gray, compare it to the old kind and say to themselves:
"This new gray is much better than the old gray because it more closely
balances with all the other colors in the Lego spectrum." It's far more
likely that they'll look at the box on the shelf and say: "Cool! It's turns
into a robot! Hey, mom! Can I get this one?" All the rainbow models that
your young fans have built and proudly displayed in the Lego magazine for
years are evidence to the fact that they don't seem much concerned with the
colors of the model, they just want to build and have fun. I've never seen
or heard of any of them comparing the merits of various hues of bricks.
I have one speculation about a possible reason for the change that would
fill me dread if it were proved to be true. Since no other explanation has
made sense to me so far, I can't shake the feeling that the color change has
been brought about at least in part to get the older collectors like myself
to buy part of our collection all over again. In much the same way as the P
C industry and other industries have pretedermined obsolesence, you have
decided to see if you can cash in on this idea, especially since the
collector market tends to have more money to spend as we don't have to ask
our parents for it! I really hope that this isn't the case, but with no
other acceptable explanation, I can only tell you that I'll now be spending
my dollars solely on the secondary market. At least there I'll know that
what I'm buying is what I want to buy, and not what someone else thinks I
should buy.
My second grievance is the click-hinge conversion. It's obvious that you're
phasing out the fingered hinge pieces and replacing them with click-hinge
versions. Why isn't there room the Legoverse for both? Click-hinges are a
fun and exciting addition to the Lego System of Play, but they are
compeletely unacceptable as replacements because they do not work the same
way that fingered hinges do. Many of the new click-hinges by virtue of
their design take up more space than the fingered hinges and so actually
restrict the building possiblities instead of expanding them. Many of the
click-hinge plates cannot have another plate stacked directly on top or the
bottom because of the size of the click-hinge mechanism prohibits this.
In many configurations they are also aesthetically unappealling and often do
not function as they're intended when compared with the fingered version.
The click-hinge versions of the cargo doors on the new Cargo Train (#4512,
pages 48-49 of the Summer 2004 catalog) are a perfect example of this. The
huge gaps where the click-hinge parts meet look very unrealistic. As a
representation of a real object, if these doors are meant to hold in sand or
gravel then they're going to fail totally. The sand or gravel could just
run right out through the cracks! These gaps are also especially
unrealistic when applied to space models. You don't want cracks in your
spaceship canopies in the vacuum of space! Additionally, the stiffness of
the click-hinges is often such that instead of opening out, the door or
canopy often snaps off the model into your hand. That never happened with
fingered hinges. Furthermore, click-hinges also restrict the range of
angles available. Whereas most fingered hinges have a rotational angle of
every degree in the entire 180; click-hinges are only stable at every 20
degrees. Click-hinges are great for mechs and other things that need to
hold poses, but they are totally unsuited for doors and other things that
are supposed to open smoothly and easily.
My third grievance is less specific, but no less important: advertising. I'
ve noticed that the Lego catalogs have become increasingly "noisy" with
flashy graphics and blurry motion lines that are obviously an attempt to
make the sets seem action-packed. Indeed they are, but you're overselling
the product. The child's imagination is where the action comes from. When
I was a child browsing through Lego catalogs from the 80's and 90's, I loved
(and still love) the simplicity of the layout. All the sets are clearly
photographed against a simple background so I can see EXACTLY what's in
them. This is very important for a varitey of reasons. First of all, the
stillness was captivating because the sets seemed poised for action. They
seemed to be calling to me: "Come on, Dave, we just need your two hands and
imagination and we can go anywhere!" The anticipation of that was terribly
exciting, and I couldn't wait to get new sets so that I could build them and
take the minifigs on all kinds of adventures. Secondly, if you want
consumers to purchase your product then you need to clearly show them what
it looks like. Hiding it behind swooshing motion lines and dressing it up
with flashy graphics is unnecessary and ultimately misleading. These days
the sets are photographed and presented as to appear to be practically
playing by themselves. What do they need kids for? I don't believe that
children need to be dazzled and bombarded with action-packed imagery in
order to imagine what the creative possibilities are. Don't do their
dreaming for them, let them do it themselves. One thing children have
always know how do better than anybody else is PLAY!
The Summer 2004 Shop At Home catalog has a perfect example of the graphical
"busyness" I'm talking about. The new horse bardings on the front cover
appear to have light shining from their eyes. There is no such light in the
piece because it's not electronic. Santis' sword is wreathed in flame and
appears illuminated, yet it does light up. His shield emblem is the bear,
which has nothing to do with fire anyway. On page four, the faux waterfall
at the base of the Citadel of Orion (#8780) obscures the fact that the set
comes with a treasure chest full of jewels. If I were a kid, I'd wanna know
that the treasure comes with that set 'cause jewels are cool! Page nine has
a nice big picture of the front of the new Ogel Mountain Fortress (#4748),
but only a teeny one of the back. There's a whole lotta stuff going on back
there! I wanna see! Many of the set pictures in the catalog have this
problem. Mostly, I just can't see what's in the entire set, and if I'm not
sure what's in it, I'm going to hesitate to buy it. As a long-time
collector, I'm just as interested (sometimes more so) in the pieces in the
set than in the set itself. I'd also like to call to your attention to a
major graphical error on page forty-seven regarding the Train Level Crossing
(#10128). Directly under the main tower in the picture of the set is a
smaller version of the same picture of the entire set. Smack your
proofreaders TLG, they're falling asleep on the job! I noticed this the
first time I looked through the catalog, and I'm not even a big Train fan!
Finally, I'd like to address the issue that ties together everything that I'
ve already discussed: your perceived target market. It seems to me that all
my difficulties with accepting the recent changes to the Lego System of Play
derive from a misconception of which target market you should be aiming for.
I understand that Lego has to compete with many other toys. Children have
lots of choices for entertainment these days (too many if you ask me, and
many them being purely brainless distractions that will teach them nothing).
If some children wanna play with Power Rangers, bombard their brains with
Playstation games, or blast the bad guys with GI Joe then that's fine.
However, these toys offer a completely different pattern of play than Lego
does. With these toys, you just rip open the box and take the toy out and
that's it. That's not what Lego is all about, and it never should be. You
shouldn't be trying to alter your product to appeal to short attention
spans; you should be offering your product as the alternative! After all,
half the fun of Lego is building the toy before you play with it.
Emphasizing quick-to-build designs with pieces that could made
out-of-many-smaller-pieces defeats several core principles of the Lego
System of Play. A huge part of the learning process involves discovering
how pieces fit together. Mistakes are inevitable, but the beauty of Lego is
that any mistake is easy to fix and always provides a lesson of some kind.
Perhaps you skipped a step or used a brick instead of a plate. If the child
is unsure then they can always ask mom or dad, and then parent and child are
working together to solve the problem. What could be better than that? The
quick-to-build set design also undermines the child's sense of
accomplishment. If all the sets are easy to assemble, then there's not as
much pride to be felt in achieving the goal. One of the great strengths of
Lego is that it teaches children patience and concentration as well
encouraging their imagination. It also fosters the understanding that
diligence and hard work will always pay off if you believe in your abilities
and don't give up when things get difficult.
From my perspective, Lego is about imagination, creativitiy, and
contemplation, not CRASH, BANG, WHOOSH, SMASH! Children can bring these
aspects into the toy if they want (and of course, they will) but I believe
that it's a mistake to make these things an integral part of a toy that
doesn't need them and is far better of without them. Besides that, you may
be able to attract a certain market by tailoring your product to their
tastes, but you run the risk of alienating the market that was here all
along that was at least partially responsible for making you what you are
today. I will still play with Lego and continue to enjoy it, but it will be
bittersweet because now I'll only be enjoying the past instead of looking
forward to the future. I dearly hope that this will change, and that Lego
products will return their roots of building as well as playing.
Sincerely,
David Simmons
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