Special Feature - Funrise

Bringing marketing to the masses

Mayur Pattni, European Marketing manager at Funrise UK, tells Toy World what’s behind the company’s reinvigorated marketing strategy and why a multi-channel approach should spell success for new brand Furlings.

Since you joined the company in February 2023, Funrise seems to be placing far more emphasis on its marketing efforts. What’s behind this?

A US-based company, Funrise’s focus has been on American retailers such as Walmart and Target, whereas in Europe and the UK, the pathways and timings to retail are different. We’ve also been under-indexing on marketing in this region: before I joined, we’d never done an above-the-line campaign in the UK and most marketing took the form of instore retail activations and catalogue pages. I was keen to level up the marketing function.

In 2023, we ran a TV campaign for our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles range as well as cinema and YouTube pre-roll, working with media buyers on the latter to improve our ROI and click-through rates, alongside a successful out-of-home campaign for Fart Ninjas. And this year, we’ve run a linear TV campaign for Gazillion Bubbles in France and Spain, followed by Disney+ advertising in France and our summer Gazillion Bubbles Premier League LED campaign.

The Premier League campaign saw us marry up a premium bubble brand – Circana data shows it’s the No. 2 bubble brand in the UK - with top class sporting entertainment. It provided an opportunity to piggyback off the credibility and trust of the Premier League and placed Gazillion in front of fans across nine games in April. In May, we then bolstered this with sales promotions which saw Funrise up +22% in the marketplace despite the overall picture being growth of only 1% or 2%. Our 2-Litre solution is also the No.1 bubble item on Amazon and ranks in the Top 10 Total Toys on Amazon as well. This strategy worked really well and we’re already looking at doing something similar next year.

How is Funrise planning to apply its recent marketing learnings to the launch of Furlings later this year?

Our goal is to establish Furlings as a Top 50 toy for the months of October and November, following our marketing launch in September. To do so, we’ve invested in a massive TV campaign (starting from October payday) as well as Disney+ advertising. Compared to the likes of YouTube, where there’s so much advertising you run the risk of getting lost in the noise, Disney+ puts us in front of kids and families right as new content is released and demand for holiday films soars. Our timing means we can ride the wave created by Moana 2: the film is slated for release on November 27th and will doubtless encourage viewers to seek out other animated movies in the days that follow. Then, until the end of the year, viewers will be seeing our ads run in front of a raft of classic Christmas movies.

For the first time, we’re also partnering with the team at KidsKnowBest on a huge influencer campaign for Furlings, starting the last week of September. KidsKnowBest oversaw the Bitzee campaign for Spin Master and has a lot of knowledge it can bring to bear on Furlings. Some big ideas have already been flying around.

On top of all this, we’re running an out-of-home campaign throughout October which will see Furlings appear on billboards, bus stops and much more across shopping centres and train stations up and down the country. Consumers will see Furlings on TV and Disney+, on Instagram and TikTok, and then on the street, including on the massive billboard near Hammersmith dual carriageway. That repeat exposure across multiple touchpoints will convert into sales. It would have been easy to put all our eggs in one basket with a massive TV campaign on its own, but the marketing landscape is fragmented, and our aim is to reach consumers across more channels. I want Furlings to be like the Turbo Man action figure in Jingle All the Way: absolutely everywhere.

What about 2025 – after your big autumn/winter campaign for the brand, what comes next?

In 2025 we’ll be unveiling some exciting new additions to the Furlings brand. This year, it’s all about the launch and (hopefully) obtaining that Top 50 slot, whereas next year, it’ll be all about expanding the range and building brand loyalty among kids with new price points, deluxe versions and much more.

Partnerships and relationships are so important to us and we want to be seen to be working hard for our retailers as well as our brands. It should be apparent how seriously we’re taking the Furlings launch as well as our efforts to expand within the UK and Europe. Sales and marketing go hand in hand, and we’ve got some very talented people in both teams. Our retail providers are set to benefit from all the investment we’re ploughing into becoming a marketing-led business.

Is it fair to say, then, that moving forward, this kind of marketing approach will become the norm for Funrise?

100%. My background is in growing brands and companies through marketing. The business has also attracted talent to help it achieve its growth goals, such as Mandeep Sira, our EMEA Sales manager, and James Xuereb, European account manager for Funrise’s eCommerce team. We want to create exciting brands, products and concepts that are supported with first-class marketing activations everywhere kids are. And the more successful we are at that, the more we can continue levelling up and investing in that marketing.