The secret to LEGO’s success

Welcome back to Exponential Growth, where I’ll share my insights and ideas on brand strategy, platform business, new technology, innovation, and staying relevant in a digital world. For more information, check out my website .

If you caught my last newsletter, How small plastic bricks became the most successful toy on the market , you already know a thing or two about LEGO’s success. LEGO’s product is simple, but the objective is huge: to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. LEGO’s mission aligns with the interaction field philosophy: building a mutually beneficial future for everyone.

The biggest challenge facing the toy industry is that their target customers are constantly aging out of their core demographic. And in today’s world, children have so many options for where to spend their time and attention.

So how has LEGO consistently managed such high engagement and interaction rates??

All of the executives I spoke to at LEGO credited the same thing: LEGO Ideas .

LEGO Ideas started life as an offshoot of the Japanese crowdsourcing innovation platform CUUSOO, which was a popular channel for consumers to suggest new product ideas until May 2022. In 2014, LEGO CUUSOO moved to a different online platform and was renamed LEGO Ideas.

Anyone can participate in LEGO Ideas. You can submit your own idea, or you can browse through, make comments, and vote on the ideas that have been submitted by others. This creates network effects because LEGO Ideas attracts more and more enthusiasts to submit, evaluate, and share proposals. It also generates learning effects because participants study the proposals, learn from them, and build on them. The network effects extend well beyond the nucleus, because the participants—almost a million in number—create ideas of interest to consumers and enthusiasts in a wide variety of niches that may not have previously been engaged with LEGO. Over 26,000 ideas have been posted.?

It’s simple to submit a proposal to LEGO Ideas, but LEGO will only consider ideas that have generated at least ten thousand votes of support on the website within a year of posting. Only then will the idea be evaluated by a panel of LEGO experts. If they approve the idea and it becomes a product, the creator gets a one percent share of the revenue and licensing fees generated by the product.?

For example, on July 21, 2016, “Women of NASA ,” a LEGO Ideas tribute to four pioneering women of NASA, was created by science writer and LEGO fanatic Maia Weinstock. Less than two weeks later, on August 2, 2016, it reached ten thousand votes, leading to its approval and production. When it debuted on Amazon, it quickly became a bestseller.?

Why is LEGO Ideas so important?

LEGO Ideas has solved a fundamental problem of aspiring interaction field companies. One of the major reasons that they fail is that they don’t get enough interactions going. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem. You need riders to get drivers, and you need drivers to get riders.?

LEGO Ideas, and LEGO as a whole, makes customers into active participants who create products and attract others to do the same. They are all in the game together, so they all become promoters, which brings in more promoters. This creates gravitational pull that keeps the interaction velocity growing and growing.?

LEGO Ideas is genius.

It’s a million LEGO enthusiasts proposing thousands of ideas for products that could answer the needs and satisfy the wants of anyone in the world. What’s more, the enthusiasts promote their ideas to their followers across all social networks in order to get the ten thousand votes they need. That’s a serious volume of interactions pulling the hundreds of millions of people who might not have engaged with LEGO toward the nucleus of the interaction field. Every post, every share, reinforces the meaning of the LEGO brand: the joy of building and the pride of creation.?

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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