Lloyd's Bllog

Now that the thrilling 6 weeks of NBA playoffs are over, with the victorious Lakers vanquishing Satan’s team and restoring the natural order of things, it’s safe to resume suspended activities… like Lego-ing. Any excuse I had for ignoring the pleas of my five-year-old (“Hey, we can’t play with Legos — those green ones look like Celtic colors!”) are over. He was done with the endless replays of Ron Artest copiously thanking his psychiatrist in post-game interviews.

When I was my son’s age, every Lego package came with suggestion booklets for what you could make, but there were no painted on faces or kits telling you where bricks “had to go.” As Michael Chabon observes in his fabulous essay, “To The Legoland Station,” they were “abstract, minimal, ‘pure’ in form and design, they echoed the dominant midcentury aesthetic, with its emphasis on utility and perfectibility.”*  Lego constructions didn’t look like reproductions of people, places or things, but rather Lego-idealized versions of them. “Where Lego-building had once been open-ended and exploratory, it now had more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal, pre-established, and above all, a provided solution.”

RIP: V-119 Torrent — We hardly knew ya

Like Chabon, I resented this change. I REALLY resented that it took mere seconds to demolish the 471 piece Star Wars V-119 Torrent that my son demanded I buy for him, the one that I had spent 3 arthritic-inducing nights assembling (suitable for ages 8-12… and not a year older). After finishing the V-119, I had declared it could only be looked at, but NEVER touched again.  We could admire it, from afar, on a shelf — “The Force,” I explained, said it must be this way. Needless to say, ‘”The Force” was not with me.

The irritation I felt at the destruction of my back-breaking Lego opus turned to joy as we played with the rubble of the V-119. The familiar tactile pleasures and purity of abstract play and imagination came over me.  As we carefully and lovingly combined blues and yellows (ignoring the greens) to construct a Laker Repeat Championship Trophy, I realized how much Lego had changed over the years.

Just 4 years earlier, the company completely restructured the product development process with a dual focus placed on innovation and profitability, reversing a long slump. New product development time was aggressively decreased from 26 to 12 months. The portfolio was reduced by over half, leading to a higher percentage of concepts getting developed and launched, and Lego devoted more resources to marketing.  The end result was increased sales with fewer products.

But reducing product portfolio and product development time doesn’t tell the whole story. Lego became a paragon of brand strength in the digital age by leveraging enthusiasts and harnessing the energy of their fans, young and old alike. They listened (to customer research and focus groups), observed (developers watched as children played with new product concepts) and learned (feedback was then used to reformulate the new toys).

Lego reached out to online communities and targeted key influencers with whom to share concepts, sending them prototypes for feedback. Lego listened to their hardcore fans — their suggestions often led to the creation of entirely new concepts.  Lego’s “Mindstorm NXT” launched in 2006 was the first company product to use online communities from start to finish in the product development life cycle, from concept generation to product launch. Mindstorm sold 150K units in the first year and now virtually all Lego projects leverage the power of online communities from the early development phase. The Lego.com site reflects this philosophy of embracing the fan base, but there are numerous online communities, including the Lugnet user group and From Brick To Bothans, a fan site devoted to the intersection between Lego and Star Wars, that have mobilized younger and older fans. Also, check out the free Lego Photo app in iTunes — which allows you to capture precious moments and Lego-ize them.

Psychiatrist sold separately

I used to think those Lego kits stifled imagination by forcing kids (and their parents) to follow intricate step-by-step instructions with the goal being a finished construction that actually looks like the real thing.  Now I realize the kits hold the allure — getting kids interested in the brand and the lifelike constructions of Star Wars (characters, spacecraft and weaponry) and cities (if I close my eyes, I can almost smell the tasty aromas of the pizza parlor we built last week). Lego kits provide the best of both worlds — puzzle solving and abstract play. Like Mr. Bubble’s slogan “makes getting clean almost as much fun as getting dirty,” Lego’s should be “makes putting together almost as much fun as demolishing.”

*Michael Chabon, “To The Legoland Station,” Manhood For Amateurs, 2009, p. 53.