The world faces a lot of challenges, and Mega Brands, Inc. — Lego’s fiercest competitor — believes that we could well experience the next generation of children living in a world devoid of creativity. That’s why Mega has declared its mission — its cultural movement — to be “creativity to the rescue.” Watch the VIDEO here. The company’s flagship product is Mega Bloks, which are plastic, multicolored, building blocks. Mega Working hand-in-hand with its senior management, we developed a corporate brand strategy that renamed the company Mega Brands, developed a new logo and brand strategy for the umbrella brand, as well as a complex web of different products. The new umbrella strategy was rooted in Mega’s well-known heritage in building blocks and profoundly leveraged it as a cognitive-development product. Our strategy was based on a deep cultural insight from mothers across the United States.
Parents today feel the magical imagination of childhood is under threat. (Just look at the hugely successful movie, Little Miss Sunshine). Free playtime is shrinking as children’s lives are increasingly overscheduled and over structured. Since 1980, unstructured children’s activities have declined by 50%. At the same
time, children are filling their remaining free time with hi- tech toys and mind-numbing videogames which parents feel are making their children grow up too fast. Unstructured free play — the kind of play where children use their own imaginations with toys to play and create, is crucial to building a child’s self-
expression and creativity. If this decline in free-form playtime continues, we may have to imagine a future generation that is less creative than ever before.
Mega therefore decided to champion the power of creativity in the fight against time-sucking videogames and other non-creative pursuits. Our goal was to create a cultural movement that is bigger than any advertising campaign and that is highly embraced by mothers of young children everywhere. The idea behind a cultural movement is simple: Understand the prevailing tendencies in society and connect your brand to this culture. It’s akin to placing a surfboard on a wave.
Read more about this case here.
The head of the Mega Brands company, Vic Bertrand, has made a big impression in a short time working closely with StrawvberryFrog. With the company's focus on creativity, he has been named Marketer of the year in the summer issue of Strategy magazine.
Love it, as a parent and as a marketer :)
Posted by: Dino | July 05, 2007 at 07:59 AM
I don´t know if you guys have seen this already, but Jon Howard has posted a good article on the Lost Childhood thing on his blog. http://jonhoward.typepad.com/livingbrands/2007/06/geography-of-lo.html
Posted by: Tim Keil | July 02, 2007 at 06:00 AM