LEGO's Through the Line Marketing Sends Nike Flying

Nike are deservedly at it again grabbing headlines for the fantastic editing and creativity of their latest advert, but it’s another company entirely I’d like to recognise this week for having a fantastic moment across their full marketing mix, and not just for doing great advertising.

The LEGO Group has had a fantastic decade, growing revenue from €1.6 billion in 2009, to €5.2 billion in 2019, in what has been a tough toy market with heavy competition from video games and other new entrants. This >3x revenue growth is approximately 50% better than what Nike achieved over the same decade, not that their own story hasn't been fantastic.

This week was a key moment for LEGO, seeing the launch of their novel Super Mario range in partnership with Nintendo, as well as a hotly hyped new playable grand piano. The former is a 16-product collection which is arguably the biggest innovation in the company’s recent history, the latter a 3662-piece playable (and self-playing) masterpiece aimed squarely at adult consumers. 

Marketing is so much more than just advertising, and the very existence of these products is a fine piece of marketing, and whilst there has been a slick launch campaign this is just the icing on the cake. The most interesting thing for me is to consider the strategic insights that have led to both products, and the underlying challenges we can infer from their existence and company statements.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m personally a big LEGO fan - I grew up playing with it, have occasionally toyed with it in adulthood, and during lockdown found a newfound passion for some of the more complex sets now available. Whilst they may be one of the few companies commercially benefitting from this challenging time their ability to do so is not a coincidence. For several years now they’ve been talking about the mindfulness benefits of their products, in the same way that adult colouring in or meditating has taken over.

They have however understood some of the challenges that come with the complexity of their range and the slight guilt which comes with purchasing something which is ostensibly a kid’s toy. Back in March LEGO revealed a complete new design, and range simplification, for its adult aimed products with a sleek black presentation more akin to a high end display item than a toy, and indeed that’s what increasingly they’re promoting their products as. Having a rich suite of adult focussed products available exactly as many have looked for alternative home based hobbies will certainly have been an acceleration to the approach.

The new Grand Piano, which has grabbed widespread media attention for its impressive scale & complexity, is not even technically a product the company designed itself. The original concept, and much of the execution, came from a submission to the LEGO Ideas community, one of those very rare examples where fan interest & engagement is so high, they will come up with useful ideas for the brand. With 10,000+ backers behind the original product and a couple of years of hype and anticipation it’s not surprising the item was temporarily out of stock within minutes of launching. 

Launching the same day was the entirely different LEGO Super Mario range. The sets certainly play on adult nostalgia, and a bonus ‘Nintendo Entertainment System’ set announced shortly before launch is indeed a new entrant to the 18+ adult range, but the objective here is clearly quite different. You can imagine the IP partnership and partial digitisation is aimed squarely at tackling the rise of more interactive competition, but the strategic impetus seems to be to solve one of LEGO’s biggest problems: It’s quite an expensive toy if you only build it once.

Yes, LEGO is partly about imagination and playing with your finished creations, but many kids (and certainly most adults) much prefer the construction phase and the pleasure of piecing their creations together. Many a parent has looked at the high cost of a set and worried if it is really justified given the likelihood that it will gather dust on the shelves once the building and initial interest is done. 

The Mario range is a radical rethink. When it was first announced fans assumed it would follow a traditional partnership approach (LEGO has extensive existing collaborations with the likes of Star Wars and Harry Potter) with classic moments from the Mario Games reconstructed in bricks. Instead they have launched a new modular system which only makes an abstract attempt at re-enacting the original environments, opting instead to develop its own stylised aesthetic. The series isn’t designed to be built with an homage to LOOK like the games, it’s designed to be PLAYED like the games.

‘LEGO Mario’ himself is the key, a new digitised piece with animated eyes, a small screen on his chest and essentially a QR code reader built into his feet. All the instructions and ideas come through a new app, and with Bluetooth connectivity you literally connect Mario to your phone and play through the courses you create. It may sound a bit bonkers, but with a slight effort to ‘play by the rules’ you can quite seriously compete on making Mario run through your latest creation and see how many points you can clock up along the way. Check out my own attempt over on Twitter to see what I mean.

The combination of such a high-profile rights partnership and an innovative play style was always going to be a shake up for their audience, but with clear aspirations to expand vastly outside of that they have left nothing to chance. Teased months in advance with PR announcements and widespread content activity, they have built interest up over the following weeks with new product announcements and high-quality videos. In a rare move they made the product available to pre-order and worked with partner retailers on a range of early bird incentives to get people to sign up.

The icing on the cake for me was the Amazon take over they delivered on launch day. A complete road block placement at the top of the app here in the UK took potential shoppers to an incredibly rich launch portal where product details, videos etc. sat alongside a sophisticated & visual ‘bundle’ creator which let you shape your own package from the starter kit and other options (watch it in my post embedded below). It’s no surprise to see the product sitting comfortably on top of the ‘construction toys’ chart (with several expansions throughout the top 10) as well as near the top of the overall toy chart - though the fact that Uno, felt tip pens and a paddling pool still beat it show that some things truly are timeless.

Did I write this entire article to justify to myself/friends/family my purchase of LEGO Super Mario for research purposes? Perhaps, but if you’re looking for a marketer at the top of their game you need look no further.