This is Part Three in a series.
A few articles about the benefits of play just to add to the information I’ve already provided.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/1/182
https://www.parentingscience.com/benefits-of-play.html
https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-benefits-of-play/
We have a problem, at least in America. Kids aren’t being allowed to play anymore. They go to school, and they’re given too much homework. Then after school, they’re shuffled off to sports practice or music instrument practice or some other extra-curricular activity that eats up most of their day. They come home, do that homework, which is too much, and then maybe they have an hour or two before bed. By the end of the day they’re mentally and physically exhausted.
Toy companies say that they’re losing to video games, that kids aren’t interested in toys when they can play video games. That’s not what’s happening. If I take my seven-year-old nephew or six-year-old niece to a toy store or the toy aisle in Walmart or Target their eyes go wide and they want everything. I took my nephew to Toys ‘R’ Us once and he decided he wanted a Megazord, despite not knowing anything about Power Rangers. Kids still love toys, and selling toys to kids isn’t hard, just put some in front of them.
However, I will admit that maybe kids aren’t playing with toys as much as they used to. Again, remember, these kids have more homework than they should. They’re overloaded on extra-curricular activities. By the time they’re done with all their obligations in a single day, they have very little free time left to play in, and again, they’re mentally and physically exhausted. They want to relax and play, to unwind, to engage in the developmental benefits of play that help them understand social interactions and how the world works, but they don’t have the energy for such demanding activities. Instead, they veg out with a video game, just like an adult does after an exhausting day at work.
Toys aren’t competing against video games, they’re fighting for children’s time against homework and extra-curricular activities, and they’re losing. Toy companies don’t need to worry about making their toys more interactive, and more like video games, that way lies madness. Oh, and by the way, that approach doesn’t seem to be working, anyway. That’s not what kids want from toys, nor what they need from them developmentally.
So, what can toy companies do? Well, they need to be funding studies that get published in magazines about the necessity of play for children’s development. Show parents through studies that having their children constantly engage in one particular sport year-round is terrible for their physical health. Remind parents that playdates are important to social development, as it is social interaction combined with free play, rather than social interaction in a structured environment as is the case with team sports. Educate parents as to the lack of benefit from too much homework at a young age, a topic we are starting to hear more and more about these days. Toy companies need to sell parents on the need for toys, since as we know, selling toys to kids isn’t hard. Parents today are the children from the 70s and 80s that were so successfully marketed to by toy companies through cartoon shows. They’re afraid of their children being brainwashed by consumer culture. You need to remind them that play is healthy, that toys are healthy in that they facilitate play, and that buying toys for their children is therefore healthy, as it is good for their child’s development.
You need to sell parents on the idea that cartoons like Transformers and GI Joe serve a social function other than to sell toys. They are morality plays, teaching children how we expect them to behave. That is a necessary function in any society and so letting children watch these shows isn’t rotting their brains, it’s helping to raise them into moral individuals. Fund studies about the necessity of morality plays, which have been around since the Middle Ages, by the way.
Additionally, people want to feel good about their purchases, so make them feel like the money they spend on toys is helping to make the world a better a place. That means assuring them that the toys made by your company are produced in factories that pay their employees a living wage. Maybe even have a small percentage of every sale go to a charity. For GI Joe a small percentage of each sale could go to Fisher House, a charity that allows the families of wounded soldiers stay near the hospitals they’re being treated at free of charge. Transformers toys have a small percentage of sales that go towards encouraging STEAM education. Jem toys give a small percentage to Save the Music. Barbie gives a small percentage to a charity that helps girls in need or something. Barbie is harder as that line doesn’t have quite as specific a focus, given all the jobs that Barbie has. Animal-based brands give to the Humane Society or some other animal-related charity. Parents would then feel good about spending money on these toys and would be more likely to buy them. The endorphin rush of “doing good” is a powerful marketing tool, take advantage of it.
But now let’s get back to television because of course, television shows are how you market your toys to kids and teach them the necessary mythology so they can have adventures with their toys. The fact that kids have so little free time means they can’t sit down in front of a TV at a set time after school every day; they’re in the car off to some extra-curricular activity. That’s why afternoon cartoons are dead; it’s why Saturday morning cartoons are also dead, it’s why Cartoon Network is airing a show with little continuity from episode to episode all day every day, or at least, why they were.
Kids don’t watch live TV anymore, they watch recorded episodes or they watch Netflix where they can get any episode of a show they want any time they want it, such as in the car while being shuttled from school to some extra-curricular activity. That’s probably also why modern kids love the 15-minute episode format. They can watch a full episode of a show in that car ride. Binge watching is where it’s at, even if you manage to get parents to ease up and let their kids be kids.
Release shows to Netflix or Hulu or whatever streaming service, or better yet, all of them. But keep in mind that presents a new problem, those shows are now out there for children to encounter forever. A child may become obsessed with a show years after you stopped making toys for it. How do you get that business? It’s impractical to keep toys in production with the injection molding manufacturing method in perpetuity. You’re wasting space on keeping inventory you may never use in stock. You can’t do that. And given that molds eventually wear out and you’d have to replace them, it’s also too expensive for too little return.
Start 3D printing toys. Sell them through websites, printing them on demand. You don’t need to keep inventory; you don’t need to swap out molds to switch from producing one figure to another. You can produce what you need, as you need it. You can even design the figures, so you’ll never need to paint them. Just have the different colors print as separate parts. Then you can either sell them unassembled or assembled, maybe make both options available. For slightly less money, people can put the figures together themselves. For a bit more, you’ll ship it out to them fully assembled, though delivery might take a bit longer. Of course, this also means you can start selling individual parts to a figure as well, should some part of the figure either break or an accessory get stolen. You’ve just created a brand-new revenue stream. And now distribution issues aren’t a thing anymore, which have been a recent issue that toy collectors have been complaining about.
That’s about it for this edition of this blog. Next time, I think we’ll start moving towards what I want to talk about, though it’ll still be more of a related topic, it’ll just be more closely related than these last two posts.
A New Hasbroverse 