What you need to know:

• Lego’s leap outside its comfort zone paid off big time, notching double-digit growth and fuelling its global marketing machine out of Australia.
• But it nearly didn’t happen. ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor was nervous about partnering with the dirt biking stuntmen of Nitro Circus.
• But then he let go and realised that to launch a Lego City Stuntz range, the brand had to go where the stunts are.
• Taylor and Initiative’s Chris Colter unpack the plan, the rationale, the execution and the results that bagged and MFA Grand Prix.
• Plus, the highly specific challenges of marketing to age ranges of just two years – and the hurdles to clear to reach kids in general.
• Meanwhile, Taylor says adults are now its fastest growing market, in part powered by Lego Masters, which is still smashing the ratings, and driving growth six years on. But that was another near aborted plan: At the time, per Taylor, the TV networks weren’t really interested. They didn’t think it would land.
• Lego could actually use the fact that it gives 25 per cent of its profits to kids charities – billions globally – as a marketing tool. But it doesn’t, won’t, and never will, says Taylor.
• Colter says more brands should take a similar line.
• There's more in the podcast. Get the full download here.

Growing pains

From the outside, Lego, by far the dominant player in Australia’s $1.2bn toy market, doesn’t have many major market challenges. Kids love the stuff, as any parent that treads barefooted on rogue bricks every morning will attest.

Adults too – they’re Lego’s fastest growing segment. But coming out of Covid and massive lockdown-powered growth, it faced rare competitive headwinds. People were busting to get out and about, kids had become even more addicted to screens – and sales of its Lego Cities kits were starting to flat line.

For a 91-year-old Danish brand, the solution was distinctly non-standard, and for Lego ANZ Vice President and GM Troy Taylor, a major leap of faith – literally, replete with big ramps and flames.

The result was a double-digit sales and key brand metric boost, and the Media Federation of Australia’s Grand Prix. But it nearly didn’t happen.

Marketing stunts

Throughout its history, Lego has typically played it safe. It hasn’t needed to take risks, as underlined by the last 16 consecutive years of growth in ANZ, ten of which have been double digits. So while everyone applauds brave marketers, usually it’s when somebody else is being brave.

“I was the resistor,” admits Taylor, a 21-year Lego veteran who initially feared Initiative had gone too far with its idea of partnering with Nitro Circus – a freewheeling stunt rider collective turned global media and events business – to push the new Lego Cities Stuntz product line. But he knew that to reach kids into stunts and extreme sports versus those into the usual ‘safe’ Lego Cities kits – e.g. a police station, a hospital – the brand had to break the media mould.

“How do we go about reaching a new audience that we've never really talked to before?” says Taylor. “We're very much an audience-based brand in the segments that we operate in. But we hadn't had any experience with dealing with motocross fans before, or fans that are into the extreme sports arena. That's not traditionally Lego’s MO; we're usually quite safe, we're a very traditional type brand. So we needed some support.”

Enter Initiative and the idea to go all-in with Nitro Circus – literally embed the brand into the Australian leg of its world tour, get kids to design their own Lego stunt car, and then watch the winning versions do massive jumps during the Nitro Circus live events – which were streamed and broadcast globally. All with Lego miniatures mascots running around and revving up the crowds, ramp takeovers, stadium signage saturation, on-field VIP areas and a Lego ‘Stunt of the Night’ award.

Bricking it

Suffice to say Lego was fully integrated. You couldn’t miss it, even if it went wrong. And that’s what had Taylor sweating. He wasn’t sure he needed that much support.

“My first thought was ‘Mother energy drinks. Women in bikinis. Concerned mums in the stands waiting for people to crash and fall off motorbikes.’ I'm like, hang on a minute, it sounds a bit risqué for a Danish brand that prides itself on being safe, making sure that when the parent buys Lego, they know what they're going to get,” says Taylor.

His second thought was, “Do we have to do this? Because we have a strong brand, we have a great following in this market. We've been operating in Australia for over 60 years. Do we need to go to these extreme lengths to launch a new product? Is it too risky for our brand?”

Letting go

But then Taylor – and Lego HQ – had something of a Fight Club moment. He let go, and found freedom.

“Sometimes you have got to let go,” says Taylor. “You have to realise that we don't own the brand, the fans own the brand. We’re the custodians of the brand, but it's the fans that are in the brand. And if we have fans that are into Nitro Circus, and if we have fans that are into extreme stunts and going to these events, well, we need to be cool with that too.”

Plus, he says, Lego is “big on authenticity”. So if Denmark’s product design team wanted to launch a Stuntz line, it had to go where the stunts are.

“If we could do it in a way that was part of the show, part of the Nitro Circus experience and it wasn't forced … it was authentic. Well, then, okay, we were open to it. And I think this proposal ticked all those boxes for us,” says Taylor.

So in the end, out of all the potential ideas pitched, “we ended up going with the most risky”.

Risk adjuster

That meant Chris Colter’s big play was in business. But he says the plan was de-risked – as far as possible – even before it was pitched in. “We always do our due diligence before we put something in front of clients,” says Colter. Plus, the timing worked. Nitro Circus was set to tour Australia, culminating in the World Games in Brisbane. He’d already approached them to get some help getting the idea over the line.

“Nitro were really integral to selling this idea, because they were able to show that it's progressed beyond a beer drinking sport into a family friendly environment – the vast majority of attendees are actually families with kids between five to nine, so right in our target audience,” says Colter.

“So we felt like it was actually a perfectly serendipitous moment – and we also had the stats and the business rationale to be able to say why this was a smart investment.”

Children challenge

A key plank of the rationale is that targeting audiences for Lego is far more labour intensive than for most products – the new Stuntz line especially. Plus marketing to kids, via their parents, is a fine line to walk at the best of times.

“Kids are one of the most fickle audiences you can deal with,” says Lego’s Taylor. “There’s no brand loyalty from kids. As an adult I’m either a Nike person or a New Balance person. But they just go with what their friends go with. If you’ve got schoolyard currency, and you're playing with something cool, they all want it. There is this herd mentality, so to try and keep reinvigorating yourself and innovating to stay on top of kids’ wish lists when it comes to Christmas, birthdays, those key buying occasions, is tough.”

Initiative’s Colter feels the same pain.

“Lego is one of the most complex portfolios to plan for, particularly from a media perspective, because you've got a target audience range where for most sets, it's two years – so you're talking to a six to eight-year-old versus a nine to 10-year-old,” says Colter.

“The difference between a 16-year-old and a nine to 10-year-old is profound – not just in terms of interests and passions, but in terms of media consumption,” he adds, with a “very finite media ecosystem that exists for kids.”

All of which presents “quite a challenge – and you don’t want to sell them a set that is too advanced for them … because when they build it they’ll get frustrated – and then they don’t continue the playing journey,” he adds.

“So that specificity of getting the right set to the right kids is really important. Then you add on to it data compliance, responsible marketing to children – and Lego upholds the absolute gold standard in all those measures – and it becomes a really difficult challenge.”

Plus, they were gunning for a new audience and set of buyers: Kids less naturally inclined to sit around making stuff with bricks.

“There is genuinely universal love for Lego,” says Colter. “But there is a there is a tiny proportion of kids in culture that don't have a particular affinity to Lego. A lot of those kids tend to be the really active extreme outdoors kids – because the play experience is incongruent with that … These kids are out on dirt bikes doing crazy things. So one of the big starting points for us was not just turn up in and around a Nitro Circus, but how do we actually win their favour and prove that we’re a toy that they would actually get value out of?

“So the approach was less how do we just get the Lego logo all over the event, but how do we deeply and meaningfully integrate into it to show the product in action? And that was the strategic starting point.”

Integrating engagement

Per Colter: “Lego’s cultural shortcut is creativity. And so we wanted to turn up and inspire creativity in every one of its forms. So we brought a lot of IP to the table.”

They brought together the stunt athletes and hundreds of kids via skills workshops, putting the bricks in their hands along the way. Then with all the stadium integration, broadcast and video spin-offs lined-up, it was time to prime kids nationwide with an ad that called for action: Design your own ultimate Lego stunt vehicle, with the winners getting tickets to the Brisbane finale.

“Then we recreated [the winning entries], so they could be jumped by professionals in front of 80,000 fans in a stadium and [watched by] millions around the world – which is that's genuinely a money can't buy opportunity for kids,” says Colter.

“Nitro Circus is known for jumping weird and wonderful contraptions – from wheelchairs to lounge chairs. But to my knowledge, this is the first branded contraption that they've ever built. So it was a big bet for them. Plus having kids design it was something that's never been done before,” adds Colter. “It just gave kids a new way to engage with their passions – and also a reason to run out and buy Lego so that they can design and build vehicle.”

Within a week, there were “hundreds” of entries, per Colter. “And this wasn’t 25 words or less to describe your stunt vehicle. It was imagine the vehicle; buy some Lego; build it; take a photo of it; write a description of it; get your parents to allow you to submit it … there was a level of effort to go through.”

The results

In the end, all the sweat from Lego, Initiative, Nitro Circus – and not least the kids – paid off. The results moved the needle and its global coverage, including via Sky in the UK, meant the Australian business was seeding the ground for Lego’s marketing teams around the world.

Per Lego and Initiative’s MFA submission (for which it took the Grand Prix), the results were as follows:

• 266.4m earned-impacts via 326 outlets (+146m within AU/NZ).
• 71m social impressions.
• 85,500 event attendance
• 22 per cent awareness gain versus same time last year
• 16.1 per cent desire gain
• 12 per cent sales increase YoY (a significant achievement as three-months prior to campaign launch Lego City sales were down.)
• Per Lego’s Troy Taylor, it delivered a “halo effect across other segments of the business … And I do believe we've recruited a bunch of new kids that weren't necessarily into LEGO before that are now.”

Plus, Nitro Circus had gained at least one new fan.

“I was very nervous, because we hadn't done anything like this before. It was a different audience, a different environment,” says Lego’s Taylor. “But, I took my kids along and they had an absolute ball.”

He barely broke sweat when the Lego vehicle crashed off the ramp.

“I was like, wow, we are actually part of this now. It feels genuine, authentic; we haven’t forced it … I get it now. I completely get it,” says Taylor. “Because I hadn't been to a Nitro Circus event before. Admittedly, it's not my MO. But once I was there I got the energy, I got the passion that these fans had for their sport. And it completely changed my mind on it,” he says.

“I'd actually go again.”

Masters powering

Lego Masters is still powering, per Taylor. “We’re up to season six now [in Australia] and we are the longest running Lego Masters market in the world … it has had the best ratings and engagement out of any Lego Masters globally.”

But just like the Nitro Circus idea, the show almost didn’t happen.

“Back in 2017, there weren’t a lot of networks that were interested in it. They were like, hang on a minute is Lego mainstream enough to be able to capture people's attention? Is building going to be seen as fun?”

But enter Ryan 'The Brick Man' McNaught and presenter Hamish Blake and the rest is sweet, pay dirt history.

“Lego Masters took Lego mainstream,” says Taylor. “Our sales exploded in 2017 when the show came out.”

That hasn’t slowed.

Adult explosion

The other thing Lego Masters helped seed was adults “coming out of the closet” as builders, per Taylor, with over 18s now Lego’s fastest growing ANZ market. Which means it now has a lifetime value model to drive towards.

“It’s almost a cradle to grave strategy,” says Taylor. “Each year, we've launched more and more sets tailored towards adults. It's more about saying to adults, ‘it's okay to play with Lego, you're not a nerd, you don't have a problem. It's actually okay, if that's your passion in life, and it gives you some relaxation, and it takes you out of the reality of life, that's fine, too.’ So we’ve really targeted adults in that space, which has been a breath of fresh air for us, because it's very hard when you're a children's toy company, because you can't target market children.”

Compliance aside, it also sidesteps the need to make the brand “cool … to get playground currency,” he adds.

“When you're talking to adults, you can talk to them directly, you can target market them on Facebook. Talking to them on Instagram you can have a very different conversation to adults to versus the way you market to kids. So that segment has really exploded for us in the last few years. I don't think we ever want it to become bigger than our kids business – because kids are our prime reason for being – but it's definitely an area of opportunity for us moving forward.”

Anti-care washing

Lego gives a quarter of its profits to children’s charities. Globally, that means billions of dollars. But it doesn’t shout about it, nor stick it on its packaging, nor ask any of the charities to put a Lego logo on their collateral. Many people don’t even know that’s what Lego does – in 90 per cent of cases, not even the beneficiaries of those charities, according to Taylor.

“We don’t advertise that fact at all. We never push it. We've been asked many times when we've donated product to companies, would we like our logo on there, or to be mentioned. But we just decline,” he says.

“We’re a fourth generation family owned Danish company. And the family have a belief that they should give back to the communities they operate in … that only the best is good enough for children.”

While some brands might make a comms song and dance about financially less significant contributions to the greater good, Colter thinks they could take a leaf out of Lego’s book.

“They don't want it to be this big public message. They do it because it's the right thing to do. And I think more businesses should take that lens, because it comes up organically in conversations like this, or it comes up in areas around culture … And then it just feels more genuine, versus the businesses that do it as almost like a care washing practice without actually contributing much.”

There's more in the podcast. Get the full download here.