Lego Looks to Rebuild Its Popularity With Girls : Toys: The Danish maker of plastic blocks saw sales to females fall in the late ‘80s. Now, it’s trying to bring them back.
By the end of the 1980s, Lego noticed something was wrong. Girls seemed to be losing interest in the toy-maker’s small, colorful, plastic building blocks.
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Company executives in this central Danish town scratched their heads. They commissioned inquiries, hired experts, studied child psychology. Finally, they learned what may seem obvious to many: Girls and boys are different.
“Girls had become girls again, after the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s’ unisex period,” international marketing manager Lars Koelbaek said.
To become the world’s fifth-largest toy-maker, Lego had based its philosophy on “the good Scandinavian unisex tradition that toys were for boys and girls,” Koelbaek said.
Were the times changing, or was there truth in the cliche that boys play with blocks and girls with dolls?
The question is crucial for the family-owned company. For the first time since 1949, when it introduced the interlocking bricks now known and copied worldwide, Lego is making a strategic differentiation between the sexes.
In the late 1980s, Lego realized its sales for girls were dropping.
“Lego was such a big success that we didn’t really feel that there was a special need for girls,” Koelbaek said. “Recently, we had to admit that we had a wrong conception of it.”
Lego will not give any figures reflecting the decline. But it had a hunch that the drop meant girls were abandoning the colored bricks earlier than boys.
So the company conducted psychological analyses of girls’ behavior, watched them at play, interviewed mothers and commissioned market research worldwide.
Psychologists concluded that girls develop interests other than toys much earlier than boys. Across cultures and national boundaries, they found girls put down blocks and start trying on clothes, combing hair, playing roles.
“All toy-makers have the same problem. Children turn their backs to toys and get interested in other things when they reach the age of 7 or 8,” said Joergen Klausen, head of marketing at Lego Overseas.
In its studies, Lego also found that pastel colors appeal to girls. Sharper blue, red, yellow, black and green--the traditional basic colors of Lego bricks for decades--catch boys’ attention.
When Lego experimented with dolls, it found that for a girl to identify with the toy, it has to be relatively large, realistic and have flexible joints. Details and lots of accessories were crucial.
The lessons were important for Lego, which tried to target girls in previous years, with little success. Its Scala line--small plastic bricks with flowers to be assembled into a necklace for girls ages 5 to 7--was a failure and abandoned in 1981 after two years.
The 1979 Fabuland series--small-sized animals dressed like human beings--was meant for both genders. But sales were lackluster through 10 years of effort, spokeswoman Eva Lykkegaard said.
Then in 1992, Lego launched its first girl-friendly pastel-colored bricks called Paradisa. But girls were turned off by the small, yellow-faced human figures that came with the blocks.
Lego tried again in 1994, unveiling its Belville line. The figures are bigger--3.2 inches--bend at all their limbs, include a family with children and pets, a pastel-colored house, a pony club, a dog kennel and nursery.
Lykkegaard, the spokeswoman, said Belville sales for its first Christmas season last year were pretty good, although she declined to provide any figures.
So far Belville only has been sold in Europe and the United States. But the toy-maker is confident that, with Belville, it finally may be learning how to keep girls interested.
“We are certain,” Lykkegaard said, “that it will stay on the market.”
Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen first produced the company’s wooden toys. The toy-maker was called Lego, a contraction of the Danish words for “play well”--”leg godt.”
Kristiansen’s 47-year-old grandson, Lego president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, is Denmark’s richest man, according to a Danish business magazine.
Lego continued making wooden toys until a fire destroyed its factory in 1960. The company then switched to making all its bricks from plastic, and the disaster turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
The company has changed in other ways: Its manually controlled plastic injection machines have been replaced by robots silently sweeping across factory halls from which human beings are banned.
Last year, the Lego Group posted revenues of $1.03 billion, an 8% increase from 1993.
The company’s growth, however, was modest, and it even lost ground in western Europe and North America by 8%. Its biggest gains came in Japan and South Korea.
