PARENT POWER!

tries, 70% of our work is focused on understanding and creating for the parent. And that’s because it is the parent that puts their hand in their pocket. And to get them to do that, you need to make very sure that both parent and child love what it is you’ve got to offer. And you’ll already know that this is a lot easier said than done. So often there’s this battle for power between parent and child - sometimes you win, sometimes your mum wins. And sometimes, just sometimes it’s a win win.

Here’s some good news for you: our data tells us something in the realm of parenting has changed and win wins just got a whole lot easier. And that something is co-viewing. Or better still co-experiencing.

In the latest of his regular columns for Total Licensing, Gary Pope, CEO and Co-Founder of Kids Industries and Children’s Commissioner for Products of Change talks about the changing world of Parent Power.

When a family chose to engage in a coviewing experience together - defined as sitting down and watching actively - that family were 10% more likely to buy into the fandom of a licensed brand.

You’re three years old and quite little. You’re surrounded by BIG people that tell you what to do all the time (and little people that might get on your nerves a bit) and yet with each day that passes you become more and more aware of yourself and the influence you can potentially have on the world around you. It’s A LOT (as Gen Z like to say). This innate desire to exert your personal power and control over aspects of your life simply grows and grows and grows. It is one of the developmental drivers that makes our species human.

You see, when children are born they have no control over what happensthe carer or parent has all the power but, as time passes this begins to change and by around the age of seven the power flips and you start to have more of a say on what happens in your world.

And that’s because one of the four core emotional needstates children have is Power and Control.

Parents have always been important and despite being called Kids Indus-

The importance of the shared experience in the development of effective and profitable franchises is so often overlooked. Which is bonkers. We know that families doubled down on their co-viewing during Covid and we also know now that the thirst for physical shared experience grew exponentially coming out the other side - the rise and rise of the LBE is now unstoppable.

It’s definitely a thing. And it’s a thing because the parents of young children today value memories over goods. Joe Pine, the Godfather of experience said in his very good book “The Experience Economy” that “Companies must realise that they make memories not goods.” Totally prophetic in 1999 and totally meaningful today. And shared experiences can absolutely be delivered on the small screen.

In our recent Global Family Study, where we harnessed the views of 20,147 children and parents from 10 countries, we discovered that when a family chose to engage in a co-viewing experience together - defined as sitting down and watching actively - that family were 10% more likely to buy into the fandom of a licensed brand. In today’s market that’s the kind of number that gets you a second season’s listing.

You see, the opportunity to co-view is second only to the inclusion of positive role models in a hierarchy of parents’ needs from children’s media. 47% of global parents have this in the top three qualities they desired.

The current cohort of parents are the first that have grown up truly digitally native - they know the ups and the downs of the digital content space and they are protective of their children’s engagement in it. 74% of parents coview with their children at least half the time that their children are consuming content. And that means a shared experience that is building those all important memories. And if they’re having a nice time together it isn’t much of a leap to see how that parent will react if the consumer products that support the show are requested by their child.

So let me make this concrete. Everyone loves Bluey. Don’t pretend you dont. You love it. If you don’t, you’ve not watched it. I’ve got a theory that the reason that Bluey is so successful isn’t because it is the perfect children’s show - in many ways it is not, there are a few things that could be better. But it is the perfect family animation because it holds a mirror up to the viewing family that reflects how that family experiences life. It somehow feels personal to your lived experience. And because that affinity is baked into each and every narrative, the whole family love it.

It doesn’t need vehicles to sell the toy line, it’s got characters and narrative. Characters the whole family can identify with and narratives we’ve all experienced but not been quite able to articulate.. It ain’t so complicated. The writers were allowed to write what they needed to write to do the job they had to do. That doesn’t happen very often in the world of licensing. It’s really easy to say what I am about to say, and it is really hard to do. But if you do it will make a significant difference to your chances of doing a Bluey. All you have to to do is engage parents in your content, reflect their lifestyles and lean firmly into the world of the shared experience.

Connect with licensing partners to explore business opportunities

Furnishings Fair, Fashion InStyle, Hong Kong International Printing & Packaging Fair) to expand business opportunities in lifestyle licensing. There will be an international exhibitor line-up

The HKTDC Hong Kong International Licensing Show (HKILS) is the flagship licensing event in Asia which offers an unrivalled platform for the industry to expand business opportunities. Running from 19-21 April this year, the Show will be organised in a hybrid format, with a physical exhibition supplemented with online business matching platform, for connecting global licensors and brands with licensees, licensing agents and traders from around the world.

For the first time, HKILS will be concurrently held with a series of HKTDC lifestyle fairs (Hong Kong Gifts & Premier Fair, Home InStyle, Hong Kong International Home Textiles and with participation of more than 200 exhibitors from Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Macau, Mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, USA in addition to Hong Kong.

Running alongside the HKILS is the Asian Licensing Conference (ALC), which brings together global influential licensing leaders to share the latest market intelligence and trending insights. The conference will cover contemporary topics including latest developments in global licensing, the balance of sustainable business, market-driven morality with focus on sports licensing, and more.

They’re calling it our ‘secret ally’. The natural systems around us; our friend in the continued fight against climate change. Why? Well, it’s quite simple really. It’s carbon, isn’t it? Carbon is both a building block for everything we can touch and ironically, a root ingredient of our current recipe for climate disaster.

Fortunately for us, nature is fantastic at handling it. Unfortunately, nature is an infrastructure that has been the subject of some woeful resource mismanagement.

Natural systems have absorbed 54% of human-related carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade and have slowed global warming and helped protect us all from some pretty severe climate risks… so far. The problem is, we’re not treating nature like the ally she is. In fact, we’ve been treating her as a commodity. And now we’re facing the stark reality of where that has led us.

Among the many contributing factors the authors of the sixth – and likely final –Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report called out last month, our relationship with over- consumption is probably the most pertinent to everyone in industry. It is, after all, the area driving our mistreatment of nature the hardest.

Issued on Monday, 20 March 2023, the report made for some rather startling reading. Taking swift and drastic action has become our last hope of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels and averting irrevocable damage to the planet. This is, in essence, our ‘final warning’ over the climate crisis before it’s all too late.

“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once,” said the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres upon the release of the report.

And what that means is every step made by business counts. There are a series of rapid emission reductions we need to make to meet intermediate climate targets: reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 and by 60% by 2035 to reach net zero by mid-century and avoid global temperatures exceeding the tipping point.

To achieve what needs to be done, we need collaboration now more than ever before. This has always been at the heart of Products of Change’s mission statement, to bring businesses and sectors together to help the $300bn global brand and licensing industry transition to a positive and sustainable future. How do we begin to reduce our emissions and regenerate the natural resources we depend upon day-to-day? Through collaboration and community, we are beginning to etch out some of our own answers. For the past year or so, we have been working on a major cross-sector project to develop an Industry Framework to help businesses across the consumer products space, from brand owners and manufacturing partners to retailers and all those along the value chain, build sustainable development into their operations and create the foundations of an industry standard, from concept and design all the way through to end-of-life systems for products and packaging. A Framework for industry sustainable development – pored over by many contributing companies and individuals – this soonto-launch resource will help us all build incremental steps towards more sustainable operations into the fabric of our operations. This is how radical change is best mobilised. It’s like eating the metaphorical elephant. We could never recommend eating an elephant, of course, but we could recommend that we attempt this seismic shift to sustainable operation bit by bit, step-by-step. Yes, we need bold ambition and swift action, but we also need to make our changes stick. This is why the Framework is about leading the industry on that journey of sustainable development, with short-term, mid-term, and longterm targets forming is structure.

Transitioning an entire global industry without applying the brakes to business is going to be an interesting endeavour. This is, after all, about changing the entire systemic design of our business model. Overconsumption and the destruction of our ally nature is fuelled by our ‘take, make, break, and throwaway’ system. And the world can no longer accommodate it.

In the same week the IPCC issued its report, the European Commission was busy making a succession of proposals as a part of its European Green Deal legislation. Among them was a set of new rules designed to make the ‘right to repair’ products rather than replace them easier and more accessible for European customers. Discarded products are often viable goods that can be repaired but are too often thrown away prematurely. This has resulted in 35 million tonnes of waste, 30 million tonnes of resources, and 261 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU every year. Better enabling the 77% of Europeans who feel a personal responsibility to act to limit climate change to reduce their impact in this way seems a pretty reasonable place to start. Furthermore, it’s estimated that the ‘right to repair’ initiative will unlock €4.8 billion in growth and investment in the EU.

Directives such as this and rules around Extended Producer Responsibility that will commence with packaging but eventually translate to products placed on the market, too will continue to nudge businesses towards a circular economy. Legislation will begin to set new parameters within which we must all operate as we look to cut emissions, reduce our impact on the planet and strike a better balance with nature and the environment. But the rest of the work has to come from us. Industry wields such power of influence to steer the direction and set the pace of this change. Let’s use our allyship, with nature and with each other, to rewrite the future we’re facing. It’s not yet too late.

Driving sustainable change together.