How small plastic bricks became the most successful toy on the market

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Any business activity can be defined, or framed, in a number of different ways, and there has been much discussion about how framing can be done. Marketers call it positioning a company or brand. An interaction field company’s success can depend on how it frames its business and how participants understand that frame.?

Everyone loves LEGO, but it is, in reality, a company built on small plastic bricks. The framing of their product is more important than the product itself. The original LEGO was invented in 1958, and has never changed. LEGO believes that the company has a social purpose. It can play an important role in the lives of children in terms of their development and the lives of parents in terms of their happiness.?

The framing of LEGO begins with the kind of activities that children don’t get enough of today: the free play that builds life skills, which LEGO defines as imagination, creativity, fun, learning, caring, and quality. Free play is about education and social interaction with parents and friends. Free play is fluid, allowing kids to move from one play environment to another—the real world, the imaginary world, and the digital world. The lack of such play is a pain point that LEGO tries to solve.

From this framing follows the LEGO mission: to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.?

The LEGO Interaction Field

The LEGO mission is rooted in the interaction field philosophy, building a mutually beneficial future for everyone. At the nucleus are the millions of children and adults who play with LEGOs. That is a huge number of nucleus participants, playing with an even bigger number of LEGO blocks. They turn out approximately seventy-five billion bricks each year. If you could lay that many LEGO bricks end to end and suspend them in space, they would circle the earth five times.???

LEGO defines the brand essence as the joy of building and the pride of creation. That’s what LEGO means to nucleus participants. They play with the bricks regularly and are actively engaged. They purchase LEGO sets.

LEGO has also mastered the necessary interaction field component of how to communicate with the new consumer: building meaningful interactions with their nucleus of participants in both online and offline communities, on social media, or at one of the more than five hundred LEGO conferences and fan get-togethers that take place every year all around the world. There are hundreds of thousands of LEGO user groups sharing information, using every form of social media. This creates new and shared value for participants. Interactions build or reinforce the meaning of the brand to consumers and deliver value.?

The second element of the interaction field is the ecosystem. LEGO has partnered with gaming companies such as Tencent and Minecraft, and those interactions create shared value because LEGO learns from the data that such gaming companies obtain from users. LEGO has also worked with movie studios including Disney, Marvel, and Warner Bros to create an incredibly successful string of hits, entertainment that introduces LEGO to kids and parents who haven’t experienced them and thus attracts new participants into the nucleus. LEGO defines the purpose of these partnerships as mutual value creation.

The third element of the interaction field is the market makers. These include the two billion kids under age fifteen, as well as parents and educators around the world, who have little or no engagement with LEGO. The company’s ambition is to attract these potential participants toward the nucleus. It is a constant, mission-critical challenge, because kids grow up faster today and migrate quickly out of the play experience with LEGO.?

LEGO has been highly successful in creating interaction velocity across the social and digital networks. Even though it was late to social media—LEGO didn’t have a Facebook page until 2010—it now scores near the top on every social and digital platform. On Instagram, the total number of followers has grown from 2.4 million in January 2018 to 8.5 million today. On Facebook, it has over 14 million likes. On Youtube, it has over 15 million subscribers with 19,044,018,927 views since they joined in October 2005. It is almost as if YouTube is LEGO’s private TV channel.?

How has a company built on small plastic bricks managed such high engagement and interaction rates?

Check out the next edition of Exponential Growth to find out!

Want to learn more?

Check out my book, The Interaction Field : The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society.

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