Company Profile - Lego

Play Well with Lego

Isabel Graham, head of Marketing at the Lego Group UK & Ireland, spoke to Toy World about the construction toy leader’s approach to the category, what factors are driving sales, and how the company is supporting its retailers this year.

Isabel Graham

What trends and consumer demands do you feel are driving the Construction category at the moment?

Creative expression, role-play, building and customisation remain key elements that both kids and parents want to see and we’re ensuring that we reflect this across our portfolio in ways that are relevant, engaging and innovative. In addition, tapping into passion points such as vehicles, gaming and films is important and something that we continue to focus on. Take Lego Friends, for example. Research with kids and parents, conducted in the UK as well as across the rest of the world, has highlighted a desire for more realistic details, animal nurturing play patterns, realistic role play and creativity, all of which are reflected in the Friends sets across this theme.

We’re also ensuring that we reflect common passion points in our adult focused ranges, such as art, travel, music and botany. These introduce new interests that haven’t traditionally been seen in the Construction category, such as The Rolling Stones and Vincent van Gogh, the Starry Night sets recently launched as part of our Lego Art theme, and the Lego Orchid, part our Botanical Collection. With three out of four adults saying play helps them relax, these sets provide opportunities to get creative while also finding moments of mindfulness.

We know that many families enjoy building together, so this continues to be incorporated into our plans and product development. Our 2022 Play Well study found that 95% of parents say playing together builds stronger family bonds and improves wellbeing. Over four in five parents (85%) called out Lego play specifically, sharing that playing with Lego bricks makes their families happier.

Is 2022 a particularly big year for Lego in terms of sets based on movies and TV series?

Our Entertainment IPs remain an important part of our portfolio. To support the much-anticipated theatrical release of Jurassic World Dominion, we’ve expanded our Jurassic World range with six new sets inspired by the film. These feature the largest assortment of dinosaurs we’ve ever presented in Lego brick form, and include fan-favourite characters like Owen, Claire, Ian Malcolm and Dr. Ellie Sattler.

Star Wars continues to be hugely popular. Star Wars Day, May the 4th, was once again a key time for our Lego Star Wars portfolio. Several new sets were available in time for this year’s celebration, such as the spectacular new Lego Star Wars Landspeeder.

We’ve also celebrated film nostalgia with the launch of our new Lego Back to the Future Time Machine as well as the Lego Sonic the Hedgehog Green Hill Zone set which launched in January, ahead of the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 film release. In addition, we recently launched Lego Transformer Optimus Prime, which sees the Lego Group and Hasbro work together for the first time. This has generated a lot of excitement from fans, who love the fact it transports them back to 1984 when Transformers first exploded into popular culture.

A few weeks ago, Lego City Missions saw the brand take a step back from the structured building experiences it’s become so well-known for. Why has ‘freebuilding’ been encouraged in this way?

We know that creative confidence is key to children’s wellbeing and therefore it is incredibly important for us to help support this. With Lego City Missions, we wanted to explore a new way of celebrating their imaginations and letting their creativity flourish by putting them in charge of creating their own builds to solve exciting missions.

The design team at the Lego Group has worked hard to ensure there’s a good balance between storytelling, which will help children get started on their builds, and open tasks that allow for individual interpretation. We want to show there is no right or wrong and that it’s only their imagination that limits what they build.

What kinds of support is Lego putting behind its range this year, and how is it supporting its retail partners?

2022 is a big year for us as Lego is celebrating its 90th anniversary. To support this, we’re running a heavy-weight integrated campaign across multiple channels including out-of-home, digital, owned channels, PR, Lego stores and third-party retailers.

We’re also investing in other themes and master brands with audience-led, through the line campaigns. For example, our Jurassic World campaign - which has been running alongside the film release - includes cinema, OOH, digital, retailer executions across grocery, toy specialists, department stores and eCommerce, activity with influencers, content creation and even a Legolife interview with the cast of the blockbuster movie.

Experiential activations remain important to us, such as the Harry Potter experience which took place in Covent Garden over Easter. We partnered with Warner Brothers Harry Potter Photographic Exhibition on this, providing fans with a butterbeer pop van, Lego Sorting Hat Big Build, trolley through the wall experience and a giant wand installation. We also ran an activation in May half term at London Westfield Shopping Centre for our new Lego Dots range and, as part of our national sponsorship of the Women’s Euro 2022, we’re running experiential activity at the Fan Festival in London, the opening match at Old Trafford and at Legoland Windsor.

Our retailers are key partners in achieving our joint business objectives and we work very closely with them on a day-to-day basis to create and execute the best possible campaigns. We have invested, and will continue to invest heavily, into nationwide campaigns across all channels for events such as our 90th anniversary and the holiday season but also into retailer specific occasions such as the Big Lego Weekender at Smyths or March Mayhem at THG.

Each channel has a vital role in reaching our consumers, so we have invested into POS and brick-in-hand events in stores as well as developing strong eCommerce assets and digital content for our partners to execute online. As shoppers are returning to physical stores, we’re working together to deliver the right type of physical retail experiences. We know that an inspiring and engaging shopping experience remains a powerful tool to drive brand engagement.