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Trends
KIDZ GLOBAL
What Are The World’s Most Popular Kids’ Entertainment Brands? Which are the 2020 trends? By Ivan Colecchia Despite the increasing agility of brands as they try to adapt with rapid socio-cultural changes and other transitions ushered in by our heavily digitised era, the top brands in the world represent largely familiar forces that include many historical brands that have been around for quite some time. Of course, new franchises and digital media have had a massive influence on child interests creating somewhat of a duality between merchandise and toy-based brands who rely on physical products and media or entertainment brands who rely on digital products. The strongest brands, however, tend to spread their commercial strategy across both the digital and physical realms. Interestingly, when we look at brand changes between 2018 and 2019 we can observe declines in favoritism when it comes to the top corporate brands, e.g. Disney declined from 10.4% to 8.7% despite remaining in the highest levels of mentions of all brands. This indicates a diversification in brand favoritism, the choice is broader than it was in 2018, the main brands do not hold quite the same monopolies over consumer desire, choice and popularity. #1 Marvel Marvel’s timeless movie series combined with its superb physical merchandising and gaming creates a brand with nearuniversal popularity between both boys and girls, particularly as ages ascend towards 14 years. Interestingly, Marvel is the only brand of the top 3 which increased in popularity, albeit a small amount from 8.2% to 8.4%.
Marvel has grown from a small and relatively niche comic book franchise into one of the world’s dominant brands and franchises. Like the other brands in the top 3, Marvel drives its success by its ability to ‘recruit’ characters and franchises, e.g. Spider-Man which was re- added to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in 2019 after a brief break-up. Disney is the world’s most successful entertainment brand and has been setting the fractions for others to aim for consistently since before the 1940s. Disney as a whole or content and characters taken from Disney franchises, e.g. Frozen, make the top 5 in every region worldwide. Its popularity, as mentioned, has declined slightly since 2018 but this may be due to the brand’s tendency to franchise new brands in order to reach more consumers, the most prolific and recent example of this being the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars and Frozen have been Disney’s two most successful endeavors and combined, these give the brand immense leverage on children’s consumer desires across gender and age. Disney+ was recently pitted into a crowded market of streaming services vying for competition with the likes of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube but Disney have pulled the rabbit
Ivan Colecchia out of the hat once more with the release of the Star Wars’ series The Mandalorian which has been the source of immense social media interest.
Disney has made a somewhat seamless transition into the modern
Spider-Man as an individual entity actually beats Marvel as a whole in the boys 0-14 category and also grew rapidly in popularity from 5% to 7%. As the last Avengers’ lm Endgame slowly fades into the background after huge success, it could be Spider-Man which picks up the gauntlet and thus, Spider-Man maybe a brand with high demand surplus going forward. Overall, though, Marvel’s top offering is still undoubtedly the Avengers franchise which makes the top 25 across every age group in most regions and also, despite superheroes being commonly stereotyped as a male interest, Avengers shows strength in popularity across both genders. It is unclear how Avengers will continue past Endgame, whether a new series will take its place or whether Marvel will do a U-turn on this being the last lm
