Viewpoint - Tristan Brooks

Tristan Brooks is managing partner at toy specialist media agency Havas Entertainment, which helps toy suppliers navigate the continuously evolving media landscape.

Parents not just looking for value in price - how marketers can get their message across

It should come as no surprise that in the last month, parents (aged 25-54 of children 3- 9: Parents Insights data) say the top factor influencing their toys and games purchasing decisions is “value for money and affordability”. But price is not a motivational consumer message for marketing and can devalue your brand. The third factor highlighted is “it can be used time and time again” and shows the importance parents place on play value. They want reassurance that when they invest in products, they will be enjoyed repeatedly. It’s up to advertisers to tailor their messages and media to provide reassurance. To communicate this authentically, you may work with trusted parent Influencers and parenting media brands to specifically highlight the play value of the product. Using highly personal and trusted media like podcasts and radio adds to the authenticity of the messaging.

Don’t overlook grandparents…

61% of grandparents own their home outright, which equates to a whopping 7.9m people in the UK with an average income before tax of £33,000 (Kantar Media; TGI June 2023). They may well play a bigger financial role this year in supporting the costs of Christmas, so it’s worth being prepared to test their engagement with your products. We can accurately reach this demographic through media; 71% uses Facebook where they can be targeted directly with specific messaging to test their engagement. They also spend three hours a day watching live TV, so consider placing airtime directly in front of this audience as part of your TV strategy, and test Google search responses to see how receptive they are.

We’re in testing times

A ‘test and learn’ mentality is absolutely crucial. The recent significant shifts in media consumption to digital platforms has elevated the need for marketers to progress through learning by testing something they haven’t done before. If we repeat exactly what we did last year, we’ll have wasted the opportunity to learn from trying something new. We constantly need to challenge ourselves to embrace new opportunities but make sure we have a robust and realistic measurement framework in place to evaluate how it actually performed against the task it was set.

Be more social

With the recent announcement that Pinterest will be partnering with Amazon to allow Amazon ads to run across its platform to provide a more seamless shopping experience (in the US in 2023 and expected in the UK in 2024), social commerce is only growing in importance for social platforms. TikTok continues to grow its reach with 50% of mums aged 25 to 34 now using the platform (Kantar Media; TGI June 2023). This is a massive and growing audience to market to directly, and now brands can set up a TikTok shop to give consumers a seamless end-to-end shopping experience within the app. With TikTok offering fulfilment services as well, its makes sense to get up to speed on what’s going on in this space. Our specialist e-commerce team, Havas Market, has been created around connected commerce journeys with a focus on social platforms. If you’d like to know more, get in touch at tristan.brooks@havasmg.com.