The growing number of children in online game rooms and interactive websites provide ample opportunities for advertising campaigns aimed at kids. Combined with an ever-increasing number of broadcasters aimed at children’s audience, the media space for toy ads has grown quickly.

Emotional Association

Children tend to view advertising as objective and usually don’t comprehend its overall nature, according to to commonsensemedia.org an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology. Advertisers take advantage by creating emotional attachments to their toys. Associations with iconic Walt Disney characters as well as movie stars and cartoons can create strong ties with the toys they represent. Tie-ins with food and fun are also popular. “Cereal box prizes” have always been a major buzz all throughout our lives. This cereal was introduced as simply “Pebbles” in 1969. The recipe was a modified version of Post’s Rice Krinkles cereal which disappeared about the same time Pebbles was created. While Rice Krinkles had a definite puffed rice appearance, this new cereal had smaller pieces that actually looked like little rocks.

Image source: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1f/01/14/1f01142df4d1e9df7d81894780b249ff–pebbles-cereal-kids-cereal.jpg

Watch this fun 60’s Cereal Box commercials imbibing the toy concept with food:

A happy coincidence happened when the creators of the animated television series The Flintstones sent out word that they were seeking licensing partners. During the first year of the show (1960), The Flintstones was aimed at adult audiences and Winston cigarettes was its biggest sponsor. In an effort to increase its appeal to children and advertisers pandering to children, The Flintstones added two children to it’s animated cast, Pebble and Bamm-Bamm. Their commercial also created a huge round of excitement among cereal and cartoon lovers.

One of the most popularly consumed children’s chocolate is the Kinder Joy and they also incorporated the idea of giving out toys with each pack of Kinder Joy they buy, giving them both what they love(chocolates) and what they want(toys).

*image source* https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xOUCnmZfDRs/maxresdefault.jpg

There are a number of quick service restaurants in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World who sell food that has been portrayed specifically in Disney movies. Hence, the association of merchandising food and cartoon or toys goes long back. Ratatouille, the movie created a lot of buzz for the very appetising and appealing meal they portrayed in the film! The dish itself was named Ratatouille and is loved worldwide!

Image: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/05/07/42/0507421e4c9ff03e36f25dbf93326a6f–easy-ratatouille-recipes-ratatouille-recipe-disney.jpg

Game On- make use of Game Banner Ads

Children and adolescents have access to technology that gives advertisers more mediums through which they can target their audiences. For example, the National Retail Federation has reported that tablet devices were among the Christmas gifts most often requested by children.

Image source: https://fscl01.fonpit.de/userfiles/6473479/image/anger/AndroidPIT-best-android-tablet-games-4-w782.jpg

Games are the most popular downloads by children using computers and mobile devices, so game banner ads on game sites have become increasingly popular with advertisers. When Mazda launched three new models of cars in 2015, one of the products for which they undertook a great digital campaign was the Mazda2. It is a supermini car that is quite fun to drive. A number of statistics indicated that the game was a major success. It received an interaction rate of more than 3%. The normal rate for the automotive industry is 0.5%. In addition, there were over 78% user replays for this game. It a good game banner ad example that utilises both fun and real world rewards. 

Incorporating products within the games is another strategy proving useful to marketers. Disney Theme Park conducts merchandise events all throughout the year. One of the most popular ones are Epcot International Food and Wine Festival conducted in the Disney World Resort, celebrating global cuisine, music and more! Their array of merchandise products for 2017 are – “Taste Your Way Around the World”, “Chef Figment”, “Brews Collection”, and “Remy Collection”. The “Taste Your Way Around the World” logo will appear on a variety of items including familiar favorites such as a coffee mug, apparel items, hats, an appetizer food plate with a place to hold a beverage, and more. The “Brews Collection” logo will appear on apparel items, among other items. The “Chef Figment” logo can be found on apparel items, headwear, mugs, and a cooking apron. Finally, the “Remy Collection” logo appears on apparel, mugs, and more!

Image link: https://secure.parksandresorts.wdpromedia.com/media/disneyparks/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/fawmtf47976362.jpg

Captive Audience│Smart Merchandise

Ads also appear in places where organic traffic can’t escape them. One strategy advertisers employ, is to buy time slots on radio shows being piped into school buses. School districts enjoy the extra money they get from the advertising and advertisers get a captive audience.

Fisher Price introduced the Woodseys from a storybook that came along with the game, giving children the experience of reading a tantalizing tale first, and then letting them live it by playing the game in real life! 

Fisher Price also introduced the Kitchen set. Remember how all of us have indulged into cooking at our play time? Their tagline was also cocooned with nostalgia: “Because children cook up more things with imagination”. Let’s take a look at it.

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/8232834263/in/photostream/

Attention-Getters

A number of tried-and-true marketing techniques continue to persuade children and adults to want certain items. Repetition on TV and online can be a useful strategy. Productions including music, sound effects and action continue to draw attention. Animation remains popular and serves as a useful advertising vehicle online and on TV. Ads made to look like news reports are also effective across platforms.

We’re going to peruse 4 best selling toys for kids, and what their product marketing strategies can tell us about creating a product that is perfect for your customers. The four toys are Zhu Zhu Pets, Crayola’s Crayon Town Toys, Disney’s Netpal Computer, and Princess and the Frog Tiana Toys, because each one of them illustrates a valuable marketing lesson, all innovated in an effective way.

Build a Relationship Between the Customer and the Product

Zhu Zhu Pets are interactive stuffed animals – hamsters, to be exact. There are quite a number of these hamsters to choose from, each with their own name, mannerisms, and unique personality. They’re made to respond to children just as real hamsters would. Meet the Zhu Zhu toys’ ‘Zhu-niverse’

Watch this video to learn more about the uniqueness and interactiveness of the Zhu Zhu hamsters.

What’s the secret behind the success of this product? The answer is in the relationship. When children play with this thing, it isn’t one-directional; the toy hamster plays back. Each hamster has its own name and personality, so the child can connect with the individual hamster that it is playing with – it’s the same secret that drove the success of toys like Pokemon and Tamagotchi virtual pets over the past decade. Let’s take a look at the immense buzz it created among children:

The lesson for you is to create a brand and customer experience that your customer feels personally connected with. They shouldn’t feel that they are nameless and faceless.

Use an Old and Popular Product in a New Way

Image source: http://mommysavers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wild-Planet-Crayola-Crayon-Town-Large-Mat-Construction-Set.jpg

Crayon Town is a line of toys from Crayola and Wild Planet. Each set has its own theme (like “My House”, “Construction Set”, and others). Kids use the crayons to color the different parts of the set, and then use the actual crayons as part of the scene. The sets have parts that allow the crayons to come alive as either characters or parts of the environment (like trees). The secret behind the success of this product is that it lets kids use something that they like (crayons) to do something that they like doing (drawing) and then do something else that they like (playing) – in a way that all of them fits together.

The product marketing strategy lesson for your business is to create offerings that give your customers things that they like, fitted together in a way that is synergistic, with the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The other lesson here is, for you to prosper, make it possible for the customer to shape their own experience with your product or service.

Tailor a Product to Non-Traditional Customers

Image Source: https://assets.pcmag.com/media/images/215688-disney-netpal-mk90h-asus-top.jpg?width=745&height=745&boxFit=y

Disney’s Netpal Computer is a collaboration of Disney and ASUS, who have created what they call “the perfect first laptop computer for kids”. Children get all the fun of browsing the internet, and the parents get lots of control to make sure that the browsing happens safely and securely (parents can even control who their kids can correspond with). The design is pure Disney – colorful, and full of familiar cartoon characters.

The secret behind this success is that Disney found a giant customer base who was using a traditional product, without that product really being tailored to them. Tons of kids use laptops, however, laptop companies aren’t making the laptops for kids. Disney is giving kids a product that they already want and are using, except that now it’s especially for them. Let’s take a look at this remarkably appealing video of Disney Netbook.  

The product marketing strategy lesson for your business is to find people who are using your product or service (or a product or service like yours), but who aren’t the traditional target market – which means that they’re probably being neglected by your marketing, and the marketing of your competitors. You too can custom-tailor a product especially for them and win them all.

Give Your Customers What They Already Want

Princess and the Frog Tiana Toys are action figures of the character Tiana from the movie Princess and the Frog.

Girls can use these toys to play out their favorite scenes from the movie, and there are toys, sets and even books and soundtracks to go with it. The secret here is that Disney didn’t create a toy based on what they thought kids might like – instead they created a toy based on what they already knew kids do like. We can even say that they took it a step further, because they’re the ones who created the initial demand, by screening the movie.

The product marketing strategy lesson for your business is that instead of trying to figure out what your customers might want, you should see what they already do want, by looking at what they are consuming out in the marketplace right now. If a product of yours isn’t hitting home, then look at the alternatives that are doing better, and explore what sort of need those alternatives might be filling, that yours might not be.

This post has been all about looking at what’s working out in the marketplace, and then trying to figure what the underlying lesson is. This is one of the best ways to learn – rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s usually more productive to try and reverse engineer the success of all the perfectly good wheels that are already out there!

The digital world dominates a significant portion of the modern consumer’s life cycle– an estimated 81 percent of shoppers say they do online research before buying a product.

To effectively reach these online customers, brands need to understand how to leverage social media marketing. The various social media platforms serve an important role as the water cooler of the internet. Brands that understand how to appropriately use these channels will find valuable opportunities to engage with consumers personally, building relationships and establishing a firm foundation to move the prospect towards conversion.

The same principles apply to those within the toy industry. Some brands in this field struggle to see the value of social media marketing, but this digital channel can produce tremendous results for toy companies. The challenge is understanding how to use it correctly.

Building a successful social media strategy for toy companies

Many toy companies will want to place a heavy emphasis on the power of visual marketing. Visual social platforms, such as Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram can show the toys in action and make it easy for users to share photos or videos of themselves or their children engaging with the toys.

The dominant social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter should also be included. Facebook remains the largest social platform by far, reaching 1.86 billion monthly users. Facebook encourages a variety of different types of content and makes it easy to build communities around brands and products. Here’s the link to the most played Facebook game: 

Twitter can also be used to promote images, as well as address customer service problems or questions.To develop the optimal strategy for a particular toy company, brands also need to know where their audience is. The demographics of Pinterest, for example, swing heavily towards millennial women. It might be a good option for reaching the mothers of young children. Instagram and Snapchat have younger users and might be optimal platforms for reaching middle school and high school aged children.

Regardless of the platform, using images increases engagement. Create content that entices users with high-quality graphics and demonstrate commitment to the customer with fast response times.

Utilizing YouTube video bloggers

Turning to YouTube video bloggers can serve as an important factor in influencer marketing. Customers naturally trust what other consumers say more than what brands say about themselves. Most of these review videos are authentic and garner huge traffic. Influencers work within different industries and position themselves as reputable, knowledgeable sources in those communities. Working with influencers on YouTube can quickly get the message in front of a wide audience and lay a strong foundation of trust. Take a look at channel Baby Gizmo’s review of Disney Princess Ultimate Dream Castle:

Videos also provide other benefits, as well. Prospective customers can see the toy in action, how it works, and its appeal for the targeted demographic, enticing them to learn more. Take a look at the review of LOL Surprise Dolls series 1 & 2 by Shannon’s Doll Channel in Youtube.

Toy brands that have seen success with social media marketing

When used correctly, social media marketing can be powerful for brands, helping them reach their prospective customers, build relationships, and encourage conversions. Several toy brands have seen tremendous success with these strategies.

Lego, for example, has built a strong social media presence across multiple platforms. On Facebook, they have more than 10 million likes on their page.

Image source: http://www.zombieapocalypsegames.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/LEGO-Facebook-610×337.png

They also have over 200k followers on Twitter and 1.8 million on Instagram. Across their social media platforms, they regularly post visual, engaging content. They also actively participate in the community by answering questions, addressing customer service needs, and providing a positive consumer experience. Take a look at how they use Youtube to put up their game trailers and game commercials  and the huge interactiveness among people–

Lego also notes details, such as the times when their customers are more active, to increase their engagement on the platforms.

Similarly, Step2Toys  has seen tremendous success through social media. They have built their strategy around the moms who actually buy the children’s products. They keep adding appealing videos of all their new products on Facebook. Take a look at their toy promoting video: They understand that customers value the opinions of other consumers as well as convenience and actively engage consumers on online review sites and e-commerce pages. Their efforts to combine the different elements of social presence into one seamless experience is apparent and increases their success rate.The better brands understand their audience and how to use social media marketing to their advantage, the stronger their results will be. Brands can also trust the experienced marketers at Ballantine to maximize their Return On Investment(ROI) from any marketing campaign they want to employ.

Realignment of toy trends

Global sales growth for all traditional toys and games was 5% in 2012. Shock-horror death of Barbie aside, toymakers are experiencing a reorientation—one that starts with demography and ends with technology. One aspect of this realignment is that women are having fewer children at a later age when they have more money: between 2005 and 2010 the average age of a first-time mother in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan rose by almost half a year. Spending per toy and per child is consequently on the up, even though unit sales are down—a significant shift, but not yet a profit-boosting one.

What is more, most children experience a character in digital form before physical play. Where the real-world Barbie doll was once the basis of the Barbie brand, Mattel’s Monster High, another highly successful modern range of spooky fashion dolls, started off online.

It looks like market leaders are responding to this trend of online games. Standalone toys lack scale and versatility. Franchises that span multiple platforms—from cartoons to video games to films to physical toys—are a better bet. The future, as Adrienne Appell of America’s Toy Industry Association says, is in “transmedia storytelling”. Hasbro’s strategy implies that a multi-platform model is now a prerequisite for success.

Toymakers can try to boost growth in other ways. One option is to reach out to new demographics. Big kids are often neglected. In Japan over 20-year-olds made up 23% of total sales in 2011.. There is untapped potential here. Three years ago, David Beckham revealed that he had built the ‘Taj Mahal’ out of Lego; sales of that kit spiked by 633% in just one day. He told the Sunday Times Magazine:”They also love Lego. So do I. The last big thing I made was Tower bridge. It was amazing. I think Lego sometimes helps to calm me down.”

A gender switch could offer opportunities too. In the past quarter Hasbro’s sales of boys’ toys fell 35%, while those of girls saw a 43% rise. Innovation by firms like Lego—which rules three-quarters of the construction segment despite nearly going bust a decade ago—has been rewarded. Its new Friends range, aimed at girls, was a huge hit in 2012. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZbE8x8ZFSqE/maxresdefault.jpg

Such strategies, though, are footnotes to the main challenge. Manufacturers must become cleverer at creating high-value, multimedia properties. Toy brands will prosper as entertainment brands. Fostering links with mobile platforms is the first step; commanding attention with compelling content and characters is the next. For the collectors of the future, it will not so much be the toys themselves but the stories they tell that captivate.

This was an analysis about various modern marketing techniques for your Toy Industry. If you would like to have a detailed discussion, please get in touch with us at hello@pixelsutra.com. We would be glad to assist you.