🌈 LEGO: 4 Secrets Behind the Brand
The strategy the toy brand has been using since 1932 to win the hearts of children and, more recently, adults. Plus a look at the challenge of sustainability.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter of FUTURES. Thank you so much for reading along 💚 If you want to learn strategic marketing from me, then my Simple & Sustainable Marketing Academy is the perfect fit for you.
I love building things. Brands, companies, projects, workshops - and real things.
My father taught me craftsmanship, so every piece of furniture is a small construction project for me, and I'm currently building a covered area on my terrace out of wood myself.
Even as a child, I loved building things. I built a lot - no, an incredible amount of LEGO as a child. Proud knights' castles, Wild West cowboys, underwater adventures, pirate ships - I built entire worlds in my nursery. Why am I telling you this now?
Because LEGO as a brand has undergone a fascinating shift in its identity, which has also captivated me.
I want to write about one of my favorite brands today: LEGO.
🪄 The brand magic with which LEGO has been successful for decades
💆 The great strategy they have used to grow their market
🔮 How the brand communicates in tune with the times
💔 Why LEGO is a guilty pleasure (spoiler: sustainability)
🎓 4 tricks we can learn from the brand
🪄 The brand magic of LEGO
Welcome to the wonderful world of LEGO - a place where creativity and imagination know no bounds!
LEGO has long been more than just a toy manufacturer of colorful building bricks. The brand embodies an attitude to life that is characterized by values such as curiosity, learning, discovery, and, above all, fun. Since its beginnings in 1932, LEGO has captured the hearts of children all over the world and playfully expanded the boundaries of our imagination.
The LEGO brand is about meaningful play for every age, but that brand isn’t borne of their website or marketing alone. You must take their positioning, product strategy, collabs, press, communities, business model and innovations altogether to understand their deeper brand. If you stopped at the website, you’d just think it was a toy company.
Jasmine Bina, Conceptbureau
The LEGO brand story begins with a simple wooden toy made in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen. Inspired by the Danish word "Leg godt", which means "play well", the name LEGO was born. Even then, the founder knew that he was making more than just toys - he was creating a universal medium for creative expression and endless possibilities.
Over time, LEGO became synonymous with quality, safety, and innovation. Generations of children not only built towers and castles but also unforgettable memories. LEGO became the building block of their imaginary worlds, built on the foundations of teamwork, perseverance, and problem-solving skills.
But then the brand ran into a problem.
It has always been stated that their kits were made for the 6-99 age group. However, the core target group was children and young people.
In other words, what we call a fixed market with no further growth potential.
💆 From children to stressed adults: Adults welcome
Alexander the Great is said to have wept when he saw that there were no more lands he could conquer.
LEGO is more pragmatic.
Having planted its flag in almost every conceivable area of children's entertainment, the company began to target its plastic bricks at adults.
“LEGO was able to come back from near bankruptcy by connecting with the "lovers" of the brand. It refocused its energy on the LEGO fan communities around the world involving both children and adults and fully celebrated the creative work of its most devoted users.”
Tim Leberecht, The Business Romantic
With this bold strategic shift, the company recognized the potential to inspire the inner children of adults as well. With a new range of toys specifically for adults, such as the popular LEGO Architecture and LEGO Creator Expert sets, LEGO also offers grown-ups a stage to express their creative side.
This strategic shift is based on a razor-sharp diagnosis and a clear insight: we don't want to stop playing when we grow up.
“In our hectic, modern lives, many of us focus so heavily on work and family commitments that we never seem to have time for pure fun. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we stopped playing. When we carve out some leisure time, we’re more likely to zone out in front of the TV or computer than engage in fun, rejuvenating play like we did as children. But play is not just essential for kids; it can be an important source of relaxation and stimulation for adults as well.”
Lawrence Robinson, Melinda Smith, M.A., Jeanne Segal, Ph.D. & Jennifer Shubin
Games have an even more important role to play in our mental health and well-being, as this article describes:
Reduce stress. Playing is fun and can trigger the release of endorphins, the body's natural feel-good chemicals. Adults who play have lower stress levels.
Improve brain function. Activities that challenge the brain can help prevent memory problems and improve brain function.
Stimulate creativity. Children often learn best when they play - a principle that also applies to adults. Play also stimulates the imagination and helps us solve problems.
LEGO uses basic psychological patterns such as the need for a sense of achievement and the pursuit of creative expression, or a break from the often dull everyday life, to create a deep emotional bond in adults too.
"Play is something done for its own sake. It's voluntary, it's pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time. And the act itself is more important than the outcome."
Dr. Stuart Brown, National Institute for Play
They do a great job of implementing this in their marketing, such as with the "Find your Flow" campaign:
It's a smart move by LEGO to appeal to the self-confidence of adults who spend their time and money on what is traditionally seen as an activity for children.
With the claim "Adults welcome", they appeal to the nostalgia of our past and awaken children's curiosity for the future.
The message is clear: it's never too late to be a builder again and reshape the world out of colorful bricks.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
George Bernard Shaw
LEGO has managed to bridge the gap between generations and build a target group that is not defined by age limits. Their legendary slogan "Just imagine" embodies not only the joy of play but also the deep brand love that LEGO inspires in young and old alike.
Do you want to make your marketing strategy fit for the future?
That's exactly what I specialize in at FutureS.
Simply contact me directly here or take a look at who we work for.
That's why I also spend wonderfully relaxing hours every few months putting together a new set.
🔮 Right at the forefront: Gen Alpha, community, influencers & Inclusion
LEGO doesn't just focus on adults - they also develop strategies for the very young, create communities, work with influencers, and focus on inclusion:
Picking up Gen Alpha through play - Back in April 2022, the company announced that it was entering into a long-term partnership with Fortnite developer Epic Games to make the future of the internet safe and fun for children and families.
The first result of this collaboration is LEGO Fortnite - an immersive, creatively inspiring, and engaging digital experience for children of all ages.
A brilliant move - because the company is going where young Gen Alpha already is and creating a world of its own.
Empowering the community - With a specially created community, the "World Builder", the brand enables its fans to develop new worlds themselves, which can then be evaluated and added to by the community.
If a world goes directly into production, the architect receives 37,500 dollars. Even if the company only buys individual elements of a world, e.g. figures or artwork, the developers of the element receive 750 dollars each.
This is a great incentive because LEGO is creating an external innovation department from its superfans, who can live out their love of the brand even more and are rewarded for it.
Influencer - Although LEGO stumbled across a faux pas at the beginning of their influencer efforts, where they sued a fan and YouTuber, influencers are now an integral part of the content marketing mix.
New product launches often involve working with suitable micro-influencers, which also helps the brand reach new communities and bring them closer to them.
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Inklusion - With its foundation, the company is also committed to giving all children opportunities to play. For example, it has its own Braille edition with bricks that each correspond to a letter of the alphabet to give visually impaired customers access to its building system.
The company was also awarded a prize for the best innovation in 2023.
LEGO does a lot more marketing well, like their numerous movies, great print ads, or creative guerrilla marketing activities like a Botanical Pop-Up Café.
BUT:
LEGO has a big vulnerability.
💔 Why LEGO is a "guilty pleasure"
LEGO bricks and packaging are (still) largely made of plastic.
And plastic is made from crude oil.
Initial attempts have been made to produce bricks from other materials such as bio-polyethylene (bio-PE) - a soft, durable, and flexible plastic made from Brazilian sugar cane. According to their statements, 200 LEGO elements have now been produced in this way, but the CO2 footprint of the "old" bricks is still large.
The company is also aware of this and is investing heavily in finding new alternatives for the rest of its elements. But a first attempt to work with rPET was unfortunately terminated in 2023 without success.
However, they are not yet where they want to be in terms of packaging either. By 2025, all packaging should be made from sustainable materials - a very ambitious goal, as the small plastic bags in particular (there must have been 40 of them in my last set) still have a major disadvantage.
Despite all the great marketing examples, the company still has a big gap when it comes to the future and real sustainability along the entire value chain: 98% of its CO2 footprint is generated in Scope 3 of the ESG area:
With the upcoming EU directives, LEGO will also have to integrate these emissions into its sustainability reports and thus face a complex marketing problem.
The Lego example serves as a cautionary tale in the complex ESG landscape for which most companies are not well prepared. As more companies come under scrutiny for their entire carbon footprint, we may see more instances where well-intentioned sustainability efforts run into uncomfortable truths.
Tinglong Dai, Christopher S. Tang, Hau L. Lee in TheConversation.com
As a brand enthusiast, I very much hope that the company will soon find a solution here too.
Because playing, curiosity, and being a child should not be bad for the environment. Otherwise, people may be happy in the short term if they can indulge their play instinct, but in the long term, this creates an ever-increasing problem for us all and the planet.
And in marketing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a good line of communication, consumers will ask more frequently and demand solutions. This is a big risk for the brand.
But what we can give LEGO credit for is transparency:
They communicate openly about their progress and any problems they encounter. Something that is especially important to younger generations and is a first step towards long-term trust.
As Solitaire Townsend describes in Solutionists based on a Futerra study:
“(Gen Z)… just want to know they’re not being lied to. In fact disclosing failures is a helpful step towards showing the sincerity consumers are seeking. 45% of Gen Z say they would trust a brand more if they were honest about a sustainability challenge with their product, and just 13% would trust less.”
Disclaimer: I have asked the LEGO Group for a statement on sustainability, but have not yet received a reply.
🎓 What can we learn from LEGO?
Being so critical as a brand fan is not easy, but I want to give you readers a holistic picture.
And this has a lot of good points from which we can learn a lot for our own marketing, and one weak point.
Let's start with the strengths.
LEGO has done one thing right above all:
1️⃣ Like Patagonia and Apple, they invest in brand building.
Many young companies and start-ups focus on their products and work on incremental improvements. But they forget the power and appeal of a strong brand.
It was not for nothing that the brand LEGO 2023 was the most respected company in the world.
2️⃣ LEGO has continually reinvented itself over the years and has remained innovative to meet changing market conditions. From the introduction of new product lines to the integration of technology into their sets, the company has shown the importance of being flexible and adaptable.
This only works if we as a brand have a clear picture of the market and a strategy that creates room for innovation and allows us to change our business along with it.
3️⃣ And LEGO, as described, invests heavily in building a passionate fan base that actively engages with the brand.
By promoting community events, and online discussions and providing platforms for user-generated content, LEGO creates a strong bond with its customers.
4️⃣ Last but not least, we can learn from LEGO that we need to address sustainability early and intensively. Companies - large and small - need to have a clear view of their current impact and develop bold, authentic ways to "green" their entire value chain.
For small companies and start-ups, this starts with the selection of a sustainable electricity and energy provider, their transportation routes, and the use of sustainable materials in production.
If sustainability is considered from the outset and is at the heart of the strategy, companies not only create long-term ecological and social value but also a stronger bond with their customers and improved resilience to external challenges.
🎬 Last words
My inner child is still happy about every LEGO posting and set.
Because for me, the brand stands for play and relaxation. And we and our world need that like never before:
“If we don't play, there are serious consequences.
What you begin to see when there's major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they're not much fun to be around. You begin to see that the perseverance and joy in work is lessened and that life is much more laborious.
In other words, all work and no play makes everyone a whole lot duller.”
Thanks for reading along,
PS: You can also read this posting in German.