Subject:
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Re: Holy Mackerel! LEGO survey...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general, lugnet.lego
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Date:
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Sun, 17 Apr 2005 18:40:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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7188 times
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In lugnet.general, Jake McKee wrote:
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- Would you buy LEGO toys for children 0-11? Y/N
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I would, and in fact I do, for my little brother who turns 11 this June.
Because it’s LEGO. In my mind that is a reason in of itself.
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- What feature(s) would you add if you were the marketing director of LEGO?
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I have absolutely no idea what you’re asking here. But as long as you’re
mentioning marketing, I’ll point out that I can watch a full day of Nickelodeon,
followed by a full day of Cartoon Network, and not see any LEGO commercials
whatsoever beyond the occasional Bionicle ad. This is not good.
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- How would you change existing LEGO products if you wanted to sell them for
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Ditch the large figures from the “4+” range. Like Mr. Vallenduuk said, you guys
have the minifig--arguably symbolic of the very idea of construction toys--and
you go out of your way to design a figure that looks different and isn’t
compatible? I honestly cannot concieve of any line of reasoning that would make
this seem like a good idea. Some of the larger scales LEGO has used in the past
have made sense--Technic comes to mind--but here, all you’re doing is limiting
your designers by forcing all figure-related features to take up more space.
Better, more useful pieces. My little brother always comes into my room and
plays with my pieces instead of his, partly because my collection has the real
volume, but mostly because, as he says, I’m the one with all the cool pieces.
And he has a lot of recent sets, whereas my collection mostly covers the 80s to
90s. I think that says something. In particular, stop this “a car consists
of a car piece, a windshield piece, and some extra bits for details” crap.
Okay, it hasn’t been that bad lately, but sets like #7238 Fire Helicopter
truly and seriously make me want to cry. C’mon, I was building more complex
sets than this when I was 3. The Designer sets are a step in the right
direction.
If you really are trying to figure out what would make people spend more for the
same piececount (which I don’t think is a good way to approach this, given a)
your target audience and b) the fact that the competition already has an
advantage in terms of price), minifigs will help you out. There hasn’t been a
LEGO set in history that wouldn’t have been better if it’d had one more minifig
in it. This is especially true of the Star Wars line, with its severe
Stormtrooper shortage, and of the Harry Potter line, where there are plenty of
minifigs but all of them are Harry.
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- What new products would you launch?
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A full-fledged “mini” theme. It looks like you’re already headed towards this,
with the Factory and such, and I approve. I think the logical way to go would
be to create mini versions of classic sets--I know I’d buy a mini #6781
SP-Striker, for instance.
A hospital subtheme for the City theme. LEGO has always been really bad about
this: if your house is on fire, is being robbed, or is only half built, there
are plenty of firefighters, police officers, and construction workers to solve
your problem, but if you fall off the roof you’re pretty much screwed. The only
reason we have even one ambulance among more-or-less-current sets is that there
was one in Spider-Man 2.
Lots more Designer sets. This type of thing used to be what defined LEGO.
And it really seems like there should be another price point between the $10
sets and the X-Pods.
More Bionicle, less supersized Knights Kingdom. The former is a successful LEGO
theme; the latter is a bizarre subspecies of the Knights Kingdom theme that
doesn’t look right next to any other product LEGO has ever sold.
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- What should LEGO be doing that it isn’t now?
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Space. No, seriously. Star Wars is cool and all, but it’s a whole different
animal from the old Space sets. (The minifigs in particular are more like Town
stuff.) Ideally I’d want new sets from each of the old themes, like Space
Police, but there’s no reason this couldn’t also take the form of a “realistic”
space theme (in which case I think it’d be better to follow the Launch Command
model than Space Port).
Small, inexpensive sets, like everyone else said. Making mostly very large sets
makes the shelves look pretty, but it also reduces your impulse buys to roughly
zero. X-Pods are good this way, though I get the feeling that the pod
containers drive the price up--put them back in cardboard boxes, like in the old
days.
Minifig packs. Have you noticed a recurring theme yet? :P People like these
little guys, and currently the only way to get more of them than the sets
provide is by ordering an expensive “Community Workers” set from the S@H
website. To kids whose parents won’t buy a huge set for one minifig, which is
most of them, Princess Leia does not exist and Dumbledore is only a rumor. You
could also probably get some decent sales from offering packs of “classic”
minifigs (like, say, soldiers from the early Pirate sets, or classic space or
Futuron astronauts). In order to accomplish their purpose, of course, these
would have to be sold at retail, not just as S@H exclusives.
And finally... There are always going to be some unenlightened fools who don’t
buy plastic building blocks, and nothing you or anyone else can do will change
that. The people who like your product like it for what it is: a system of
plastic building blocks. Trying to turn it into something else is only going to
alienate your existing customers, and you’re never going to beat Mega Bloks at
being “like LEGO except stupid” anyway. Just concentrate on being LEGO.
-Andrusi &&
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Holy Mackerel! LEGO survey...
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| All, I know that some of you have attempted to fill out the survey announced yesterday on LEGOfan.org, only to be turned away with a message about the survey being complete. After some late night phone calls and early morning emails, I've been to (...) (20 years ago, 16-Apr-05, to lugnet.general, lugnet.lego) !!
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