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Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

joshsummers.co.uk

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Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#51

Post by maxerickson »

pavlov wrote: post #34
jamespo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can buy something else and the company can go bust.

Still, you can only buy something else within the range of options on the market. Ideally companies adjust their product lines based on customer demand. In reality it's mostly determined by other factors like supply chain, internal politics, competitor envy, random advice from consultants, need to meet quarterly growth goals, etc. For example, high-fructose corn syrup has become a major ingredient of many American fo…

Consumers could have demanded products without corn syrup in them. It turns out they don't care.

If people did care, those other factors probably would have had to take a back seat to consumer demand. So I don't think you can say that it was irrelevant to the rise of HFCS.

(You can argue that people are ill informed and blah blah blah, but that's still them not caring enough to demand whatever it is you think they should be more informed about)

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#53

Post by corin_ »

DanBC wrote: post #44
ptaipale wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the toddlers can pick, the gendered products were there first. But it is true that kids even make gendered toys out of practically nothing. For instance, a local kindergarten here: three-year-old boys were forbidden to have toy guns. So the kids took some flat crispbread at the midday meal and chewed edges off to make it gun-shaped, and then started playing cops and robbers. Bang bang.

A child-made toy gun is not a gendered toy. A gendered toy would be a toy gun packaged in a blue box with only images of boys on the packaging.

What makes blue more boy-specific than guns are, objectively? For whatever reasons, whether through child instincts or society, both are generally preferred by boys over girls.

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#54

Post by gambiting »

johntaitorg wrote: post #38

Lego is now only a 3D jigsaw puzzle, sadly. Lego Classic has just arrived in the UK but it seems a half-hearted piece of mummery to me.

As a kid I used to have tons of Lego. My dad would always bring a set or two back after being abroad for a few weeks, so I had boxes full of Lego. And they were all specific(jigsaw-like) sets - bulldozers, cars, castles, Indian forts, spaceships, that kind of thing. And you know what? Just because the instructions say you have to build a spaceship,doesn't mean you can't disassemble it afterwards. I remember that I would build something,and next day it was back in pieces, contributing to my huge Lego city or whatever it was that I was working on at the moment. For me, sets were just a fun thing to assemble for a day,and then a source of parts after day one.

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#55

Post by olavk »

A subtlety which is not mentioned in the article: Why do we like the ad? Because it it targeted towards grownups! This is due to the understanding in the Lego company at the time, that parents decided what to buy for their children. Therefore ads where aimed towards parents, explaining how Lego help the kids develop and learn and so on.

But better market analysis later showed that it was a mistaken belief. Actually it is kids that decide what they want, and parent oblige. Therefore Lego does not make this kind of ads anymore. They make marketing directly towards the consumers: The kids.

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#56

Post by robbiep »

Lego. The toy of my childhood.

My brother, sister and myself are the youngest of our cousins, and ended up inheriting all their Lego.

We had a whole verandah (grew up in Australia in the country) filled with our Lego city.

It became all encompassing. We had no close neighbors(nearest was 6 km away) and no console until the n64 was old so it was Lego or helping Dad on the farm.

We had the most detailed alternate reality you could imagine. Characters, occupations, a little economy (each of us had a primary character . And then all their accessory characters, and we would have a million dollars... Learned a lot about closed economies from that little experiment!) We made cheque books with little bits of carbon paper, and would reconcile the transactions.

We would start a 6 month long session by determining the rules- is space allowed? Western? Only one character? Combine with the train set for transport?) And then play out until our 'dump' of all the remaining pieces was left with nothing but the rejects... Then tear down our civilisation, rub of the chalk Marks from the floorboards that laid out the streets (we only had for pieces of road and they were all corners!)

I dislike that Lego only comes in kits now... The glory of Lego was in getting a massive rub of pieces and doing whatever you dreamt up out of it. We had a Lego police station and helicopter and a restraint, and they were great centerpieces, but the beauty of our playtime was that it was a creative effort of the the of us. Through out we learned/discovered economics, banking, made mini newspapers, the rules of society... I ever created my first computer program in vb so we could do our bank statements on it.

So much love for Lego. Maybe Minecraft fills a similar role in today's kids?

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#58

Post by agumonkey »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
agumonkey wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had no choice, the "univeral building blocks" patent ended not long ago, facing competition now, they had to find sustainable cash flow.

Given how long ago it expired and how terrible the competition is I think Lego is the poster company for showing that execution quality is crucial.

That's weird, I read about it really not long ago. Maybe they tried to delay things through legal means. That said yes, the LEGO company put a lot of thinking in their 'toys'. I think it's also the way things were done in those days, now it's all ship often, ship cheap.

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#59

Post by DanBC »

icebraining wrote: post #40
pavlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, you can only buy something else within the range of options on the market. Ideally companies adjust their product lines based on customer demand. In reality it's mostly determined by other factors like supply chain, internal politics, competitor envy, random advice from consultants, need to meet quarterly growth goals, etc. For example, high-fructose corn syrup has become a major ingredient of many American fo…

For example, high-fructose corn syrup has become a major ingredient of many American food products within the past 20+ years. That didn't happen because of consumer demand, and consumers don't have an easy way to vote against it. That's a pretty bad example, since that was in good part a result of the action of elected governments that have kept the price of sugar way above the market price, through tariffs, quotas a…

Don't the scare quote you chose to use around democracy make you think that actually HFCS is a good example and that everyday people actually have very little power to change the way sugar and HFCS is regulated?

Re: Lego’s 1981 Ad Campaign

#60

Post by Jgrubb »

robbiep wrote: post #56

Lego. The toy of my childhood. My brother, sister and myself are the youngest of our cousins, and ended up inheriting all their Lego. We had a whole verandah (grew up in Australia in the country) filled with our Lego city. It became all encompassing. We had no close neighbors(nearest was 6 km away) and no console until the n64 was old so it was Lego or helping Dad on the farm. We had the most detailed alternate reali…

No, Lego still does. Mine just discovered them this past Christmas. They'll build them 5 times in a row and then trade with each other so they can build a new one.

I tell ya, as much as I remember loving Legos when I was a kid, there is absolutely nothing as cool as building them with your own kids. Also, they still sell those big boxes of random pieces. I think it's called the "Classic" line or something like that.

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