‘The Jammy Rascals Blog’
Brandchannel | Welcome To The Jungle: Dora The Explorer Partners With Slash!
It may seem an incongruous marriage, but it’s for charity and will be great fun- more of these please!
Brandchannel | Welcome To The Jungle: Dora The Explorer Partners With Slash.
Great kids Brands – Household Staples: Lego
- Image via Wikipedia
Apparently Lego has had a brilliant year and has announced increased profits – http://tinyurl.com/ygbzx4b
It is to me no surprise that consumers fall back on household staples in times of hardship and Lego is a brand at the top of the list when it comes to toys which mums are happy to buy for their children. When things are tough we go back to safety and security (our own childhood’s) and products that we recognise and feel happy with form an important role in bringing some normality to our lives. This is no different for children as parents attempt to find things they are certain their kids will enjoy and which will provide more than instant gratification. Lego falls comfortably into this category.
The great Lego brick has been with us for many years and we all have memories of building houses for our other toys to live in or ramparts to protect our small armies from attack or whatever. I used to build a house for my sister’s Sindy and a porch for my collection of Corgi cars!!!
Lego is a king amongst household staples alongside the likes of marbles; The thing about staples is that every home with a child will have one and this is because the play has been established, parents recognise the value and will join in with children to establish them in the home, just as they had done a generation before.
In marketing to children, many brands and products are based on household staples and when developing new ranges manufacturers and marketers should bare this in mind and take a look at whether they can appeal to the “staple” in delivering their brands.
Lego has this in spades and will here for many many more generations to come.
Hoorah to that!
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Paying kids to promote products – Ethical 2010 gets off to bad start!
It was with dismay that I read the UK newspapers a week or so ago with headlines announcing that a marketing agency called Dubit had been using kids to help promote their clients’ products through the use of social media – essentially children are being paid to tell other children how cool certain products are.
For me this is about as low as we can go and I have left it a while to blog about it because I wanted to let the initial anger subside. I still can’t condone such action and despite Dubit’s protestations there can be no excuse for the behaviour and that of their clients. One claim was that all kids have to be open and honest as to the fact that they are being paid to be a brand promoter, another was that no children below the age of 16 were used by Coca-Cola when they used Dubit.
Now, unless they have recently changed the laws of the UK, children don’t officially stop being children until they reach the age of 18 and so the age argument is hollow, but I can let this go as I’m being a little churlish, and we should all be happy to allow 16 and 17 year olds to be savvy enough to know what is going on and that they can make rational decisions.
My problem comes from who they pass the information to. It is plain daft of us to think that 16 year olds will only “age-up” in their communications. Dubit will have asked their participants to contact everyone they know to pass on the message (which they get training for, to make sure it’s just part of the conversation!), and we can be certain that many 15 and 14 year olds will have received the messaging; and what will they do with it? Pass it down to their younger friends of course, and so the chain goes on.
It’s clever marketing and when I first heard of Dubit and how they used students in this manner I applauded the cleverness of their thinking. In fact I still do applaud them because they are making an art out of “word of mouth” and are producing great results for their clients. They also do some fantastic work beyond this type of “product placement” and are clearly very clever and talented marketers!
However they have to now draw the line; don’t let this get into the younger audiences. Don’t pay kids to pass on messages and tell their client’s not to do it as well. It’s not ethical, we all know it and no amount of rationalisation and protestation will make it right.
As with all issues of this nature it’s about honesty and integrity. I acknowledge that everyone has businesses to run and that clients come to agencies for help in getting stand-out from the clutter. But we don’t need to do this, there’s so many other ways that won’t antagonise the consumer.
I feel the more often we tell clients not to do this sort of thing, then they will stop briefing us to do it. We have a duty to prevent it escalating; the excuse “well someone will do it” is not good enough. This smacks of exploitation and we have a duty to children not to bring them up thinking that they should get paid to convey positive messages or that they grow up expecting a reward for saying positive things or, God forbid, that they only do things if they get paid.
Some will say we’re already going this way, let’s not fan the flames!
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Greatest Toy Invention of 20th Century – The Frisbee!!
- Image via Wikipedia
It was sad to hear that Fred Morrison has passed away aged 90 years old.
For those who don’t know, Fred was the inventor of the Frisbee, which it has to be argued is one of the greatest toy inventions of the 20th Century.
I know that all the polls say that this accolade goes to Lego, and probably deservedly so, but I want to put a stake in the ground for the frisbee as its reach goes well beyond childhood and is established as more than a toy, its a plaything and a sport; it’s a noun and a verb!
How many of you reading this still play with this household staple and love it, even if now we can’t seem to throw it as far or as straight as we used to; and there is every chance that it may be a bit “gnarled” because of throwing it for the dog!
Whatever your bias on the toy thing I challenge you not to think of sunshine, beaches, gardens and barbeque’s when imagining the Frisbee. It has iconic stature and we have a lot to thank Fred for.
According to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph : “When Fred was 17 he and his girlfriend, Lu Nay, were at a Thanksgiving Day picnic when, in a moment of idle fun, they began throwing back and forth the lid of a popcorn tin. They then discovered that a tin cake pan flew more effectively, and they started a small business selling “Flyin’ Cake Pans” at 25 cents apiece on the beach at Santa Monica, California”
After a spell in the army in WW2 he revisited the idea until: “In 1954 Morrison realised that he could produce his own disc more cheaply, and the next year he and Lu Nay – by now his wife – designed the Pluto Platter, which had a deeper, thicker rim. In 1957 they sold the marketing rights to Wham-O, a go-ahead toy company which also marketed the Hula-Hoop, the Super Ball and the Water Wiggle. It was Wham-O which came up with the name Frisbee (“I thought it was a terrible name,” Morrison later said)…”
…And the legend was born!!
Thank you and RIP Fred
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Beware On-line for Kids; or Not, That is the question! oh, and is it ethical to research them in the ether?
Last week I attended an interesting Market Research Society conference entitled Children – seen & heard . It was a mix of fact and opinion and about the children’s world, how it can be researched and some research results. I really enjoyed the first half and sure I would have enjoyed the second but alas I had to leave at lunchtime due to the dual pressure of having to attend Toy Fair.
So what did I learn? Lots, because when learned speakers give up their time you are always destined to learn something and in this case I got that kids love on-line (we knew that) and that they are spending more time on-line (we knew that too) and furthermore that adult brands such as the BBC take their roles very seriously in making on-line as safe as possible for kids (we may not know this, but we have every right to expect it!). So you could say “nothing new here” ; but you’d be wrong to assume that.
I learned, or should I arrogantly say: “had confirmed”, that kids are the same now as they always were; they grow up at the same pace and they develop just as we did, with the same desires and feelings. The only difference is that the kids of today have different tools by which they can express themselves and the on-line landscape is just one of those in addition to what we had in TV and books, and comics and radio!
Marc Goodchild the digital kids guru at the BBC made a very interesting point – that the UK press is quick to perceive a child’s time spent on the computer to be a bad thing; but he also pointed out that most young children use the Internet to read about stuff and to get information as well as the major reason which is to play games. Marc then showed us a press headline which praised books as being fantastic for children because reading broadens the mind, ergo reading on the Internet should also be seen in a positive light!
What is startling is the pace of change and how children are adapting to their communicative environment and taking it on with gusto. It is as if they are saying that we have the same right to our own on-line community as adults do; and of course they do, who are we to do one thing and then deprive our children of the very same thing?
We must of course be vigilant, adults should act to protect children and to act with honesty and integrity when dealing on-line just as we would expect in “real life” and the conference made very valid points as to how we should be behaving when researching the digital space. The ethics still apply and we should still be aware of the data protection act and the need for parental permission when collecting data from minors.
Which brings me on to a key issue. Many speakers mentioned this: the fact that many teens on-line lie about their age, pretend they have parental permission and prevent their parents from seeing what they do whilst on the Internet. The children themselves are leaving themselves open and parents will know little about it and they are doing it because they want to play in the adult space, to join the same communities as their parents and to do it in a “grown-up” way. By being aware of it, parents will be able to have the discussion with their children and although they are teenagers and pretend not to listen, they will discuss it with their friends and will hopefully be Internet-safe.
On a lighter note, what this trend also highlights is how quickly the on-line gaming, so called “social gaming” is coming into the sphere of influence of children. Facebook games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Cafe World are already researching high on recall for teens. When this happens it does take long before 10-12 year olds take them up and then they will start to become household brands, with multi-media possibilities. Watch this space.
So should we beware kids on-line? I think we need to be aware and so do they, but there are too many positives for us to think it’s wrong and of course it’s too late. So act honestly and with integrity, which includes the researchers, and then the internet will be a force for good and Globally too.
[NB. I learned some more interesting facts and opinions from the conference and will tell these soon]
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UK Toy Fair 2010 – Great advert for positive kids!
Whilst we strive for the ultimate in ethics we forget that there is no such thing as ”perfection”. Many will say that being ethical means a healthy or green or cause related product, but I’m not sure; yes these are important but to me they are the symptoms, the result. In my book ethics is about the intention; the integrity of the brand or company; it’s honesty.
No-one or thing is perfect and therefore we should bear this in mind when judging ethics and look at the ethos of the company who is presenting you with a product which they want you to consume.
I have been at the Toy Fair in the UK for the last 2 days and I’m of the opinion that in general this is a great advert for ethics and “doing the right thing” with children and how the industry is marketing their brands.
It wasn’t always so and there are those that still market with a mind to make as much money as possible with no regard to how and are happy to just deceive the consumer. But I couldn’t find much, if any, of that this year and you have to applaud the toy industry for the way it has adapted and grown in the marketplace over the years. Olympia’s show for 2010 was a fantastic advert for the industry. It appears to me that brand owners have matured and are presenting their wares in a positive light, they are developing products with a view to how children will play with them and they are accentuating the positive, rather than hide the negative. I firmly believe that if there’s something to be “careful” of with your product, then be honest about it, don’t hide it; consumers will ultimately thank you and admire you for it. It may mean a more “long term” strategy, but the climate is right for this now, as we climb very slowly out of recession. Brands will have an eye to being strong when the market gets strong and those that build a rapport with consumers now will benefit the most when things get moving.
The UK toy industry is taking a lead in this type of business ethics and I’m delighted to highlight it!
There was even one company who’s product ranges are all “ethical” in some way or another. As I said it is not about being ”perfect” but about making positive strides and distributor Asobiare a great example of what can be achieved alongside the right attitude and owner Thierry certainly has a great philosophy, which is gaining its just reward. Mind you he is a Frenchman who spent many years working in Japan – so work that one out!
As for the rest of the show, I found it a tightly knit community of stands and people, with many familiar faces buzzing around, all stopping for a hello or a chat. It was relaxed, friendly and businesslike, which is just the right mix, and there were some great brands to be seen. My favourite: Kung Zhu from Character, which is a the boys version of their runaway “Hamster” success of 2009. I also think Corinthian’s “Ocean In My Pocket” will be a star throughout this year. My favourite display: Marbz. OK. I’m biased but it did look great:
Marbz, looking great
Role on 2010 and everything it brings; may the honesty continue to prevail.
It’s a shame I’m not going to New York in February as the buzz there is always great and maybe this year it may be a bit special; I’d love to be reporting that for you!
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Ethical marketing to kids – 2010 the year of honesty!
There have been many blogs and communities discussing the big trends for marketing in 2010 and as you’d imagine there has been all kinds of suggestions, which essentially concentrate on the traditional model of our capitalist world and rather ignore the fact that things have fundamentally changed.
Many commenters have forgotten what has happened in the last 18 months and in my mind think it will just go back to service as normal. I don’t agree with this. I feel that something has changed; there is a grassroots change in attitude to our so-called “masters”, most especially seen in the attitudes to Politicians and Bankers and the change comes out of the dislike of “greed”. It is only a matter of time before this is reflected throughout society and therefore into our brands and most especially the brands we have always trusted; those that have been sacrosanct for years will become open to intense scrutiny beyond what they are marketing and into the honesty and integrity of the brand and its messaging.
Honesty, trust and integrity are for me the key components of a new demand from the consumer to be open about what you are selling. We know that products contain certain things that are bad fro us; stop pretending these ingredients aren’t in there!
This is most especially pertinent to all brands which resonate with children or families, either as consumersor influencers, who are going to demand their favourite brands “do the right thing”, otherwise they risk the chance of being “old” brands and in the children’s world this can happen very quickly.
I was speaking to a stunningly interesting guy the other day who runs a fascinating company called CSR Plus and he has been involved in many CSR projects with government and brands and he is quick to point out that “integrity” is the ethos he is expected to deliver in all his campaigns; this isn’t coming from the client but from the end-user. We should learn from this.
Things are afoot. 2010 is the year of honesty and we’ll all be better off for it!
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Article in Toys n Playthings Magazine
This link is to my article in TnP
They decided to call me a “Guru”. I like it though!
http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1kwrz/ToysnPlaythingsFebru/resources/234.htm
Best kids jokes – 14
Two snowmen in a field; one says to the other: “can you smell carrots?”!!
Best Kids Jokes – 13
What sport do you play with a wombat? Wom!
Kids on call: phone firms target tots
I believe it’s time for Networks to face up to the fact that they “target” children even though none of them do it deliberately!
This is an interesting article about what’s happening in Australia: Kids on call: phone firms target tots.
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