Since transformers 4 action figures were a very big disappointment to me and transformers rid doesn't look any better, how can we protest Hasbro into making better product, use the ideals of our customs transformers as a prototype. Myself I loved the minicons, transformers prime legends, and other g1 legend figures, as well as 3rd party wst transformers. Who need we need to get in contact with, at Hasbro so we can make our voices heard?
Get in your car and drive to Rhode Island. Picket sign outside of Hasbro headquarters with a loudspeaker.
As another poster noted, Hasbro is only in it for the money. So protest with your dollar. Spend it somewhere else. If enough people are likeminded, Hasbro will listen. But as AOE has shown, even if it's not good, people will still buy.
Lol, I think people are already protesting. Shelves are still full of wave 1 stuff. Collectors or Kids, no one is buying this crap.
Come on man. Every time someone talks about protests or petitions or whatever it makes me roll my eyes. Hasbro sells millions of dollars worth of merchandise. OUr collector market is big enough to nudge a few 3rd party companies into existence. You aren't the first hero who thought he/she could change the strategy of Hasbro. Hasbro listens to dollars, not "voices." Maybe go buy 20,000 masterpiece prowls/sunstorms. Then the next time they put out some high quality stuff, buy another 40,000 units. Hasbro knows the market...the real market...not the one in your head. They are maximizing their efforts and profits with the stuff they're putting out. You won't convince them that you have a more profitable strategy than they do.
Seriously. I bought the Dinobots because I liked them. Same with Prime and Evolutions Bee. I passed on Crosshairs and black Bee several times. I wouldn't mind picking up the remaining four voyagers, but I've been casually waiting until I stumble across them. If I see them, great.If I don't, who cares? I don't care enough about them to pay the BBTS Premium, unlike the Generations figures that I gladly preorder on sight. Even tonight. I finally found a Deluxe Lockdown. So squat. thin crappy looking hands/forearms. Monotone color. He went from a figure I wanted to buy to being left on the shelf. Protest away. Pass on the figures you don't like. Nobody should spend $$$ on something they do not like and $$$ talks.
As others have said, don't buy the crumby looking ones. I hate how most of the general retail AOE toys look and so I haven't bought most of the general retail AOE toys.
Of course it looks like the OP just likes the tiny cheap TFs so pretty much voting with his $$ won't mean diddly since they weren't exactly making bank on him anyways. I question the whole 'vote with your dollar' idea since, unless it is some organized group plan to boycott something, what difference is a few less figures bought from you going to mean. Nothing. If you don't buy it, someone else will probably buy the one you would have bought.
You like Minicons, but lots of people don't. You just assume everyone agrees with you, and will rally to your cause. But even the collector community as a whole is not even comparable to the target demographic: children.
Hasbro's like a dog. Punishment is confusing and disorienting. Positive feedback is delightful and motivating. Complaining to someone in person at a convention is less than useless, because no matter what they do they get complained at, mostly by literal crazy people. So they just filter it out. Having a positive conversation with someone at a convention could plant the seed of an idea that blossoms. I.e. the mixed but largely positive reaction to FoC Bruticus probably helped motivate a designer to pitch the new Scramble City line. If you continue to build that relationship (i.e. buying them a beer at the hotel bar) you might even be able to swing the conversation around to things you don't dig ("you know, I wasn't getting anything out of Flipchangers, and I don't think any of my buddies were either"). Designers are people just like you and me. Sometimes it is literally their job to talk up an upcoming Hasbro product. When fans abuse them for doing this, they are ignored just like anybody would ignore someone screaming at them for doing their literal actual job that they are paid to do. Not to mention that even if a designer's toy isn't their proudest work, they have no obligation to take it with a smile when someone rudely slags it. Thank about how you feel when you get feedback that is both rude and non-constructive. But because they are people just like you and me, they ARE influenced by us fans. The Generations assortments have become more and more taken over by fanservice because designers LIKE to give us fanservice, and they like to get the positive feedback for it at conventions, and they like doing that even if they don't have a statistical or quantitative argument for re-doing Armada Starscream or Rhinox. The big initiatives like "Titan Class Metroplex" or "One-Step" come from big muckity-mucks trying to turn around the stagnating action figure market, but the individual products are pitched by the people who do talk to us and present at cons. One nice conversation can therefore have a disproportionate impact. Because if a designer had five nice conversations that all mentioned how much the fan loves combiners, or Dinobots, or what have you, that plants a seed. The content of ranting and raving, OTOH, tends to be ignored. PS they also pay interns to trawl this board for ideas, and they too will filter out crazy. You know how we specifically talk about various things as being "nice but probably impossible," such as Masterpiece Soundwave with tapes, or a new FortMax type playset, or Scramble City combiners, or a US release of MP-10 for $100? And then those things happen? That's not magic, it's someone taking notes on the topics that inspire massive interest and thread after thread after thread.
How 'bout this: write a thousand angry emails to Hasbro saying you only want them to make figures that go up to the size of a soda can. If you took that seriously, OP, you just fell into...the Sarchasm.
Yup. Plus, people complain about EVERYTHING with varying degrees of rationality to those complaints. "Protesting" your irelevant little plastic timewasters isn't going to do anything more than make Hasbro roll their eyes, since every single thing they've ever done ever has apparently been God-awful and has driven Transformers to near-cancellation.
Don't kid yourself that "don't buy stuff" is anything close to an effective way to send a message. Stop buying crappy toys and they'll just go "herp derp nobody likes toys anymore." I would suggest that disgruntled fans shop or, better yet, participate in the 3rd party market. That says what you want in addition to what you don't.
You are half right. The way to make change is to vote with your dollar. But here is where the foolish often miss the point. Just your dollar wont matter (as you correctly point out). When someone says "vote with your dollar" the understanding is that if hundreds (and more likely thousands) of others vote the same way with their dollars as well, change will happen. Hence why I said (more or less) in an earlier post..."go buy 40,000 units of quality stuff" Problem is, some people aren't wise enough to realize (or too arrogant to admit) that their group (voting block) is pathetically inconsequential in terms of size. So either we tell them "vote with your dollar" or "you can't make a difference" because any more nuanced explanation is beyond them else they never would have asked the question in the first place.
what the average fan in general fails to realize is that Hasbro doesn't really give a flying fuck what's on the shelves and what isn't. They sell to retailers - once that transaction is done they don't care what happens to them afterwards. Not buying what you want punishes the store, not Hasbro. And if you're really unfortunate then the store will notice the bad sales and not take in more Transformers toys - even though that might mean figures you really want 'cause this time around Hasbro did something right. If you want to make some positive change, I would suggest trying to find the contact details of the people who buys from Hasbro and try to put your points across to them - that is more likely to have a biger impact than anything else. Otherwise all I can do is to recomend some lubricant and to have something to bite in to as Hasbro bends you over.
Step 1) Don't. The truth of the matter is, customs and 3rd party designs are never going to be viable as mainline toys because of safety features and the cost of manufacturing. And on top of that, fans/collectors make up a very minor significant of the transformers-buying market, so there's not a huge incentive for Hasbro to cater to us beyond what they already do at this point. You want to protest? Stop buying Transfomers. That's about your only option.
Not totally true - if something is shelf warming, the stores won't order another set from the distributor. It up channels. Stuff isn't selling, stores don't order from distributor, then the distributor says they aren't able to send out as much shit. Now how much that comes to "don't buy the 1 step changers and they won't keep making them" is kind of lost, since this just gets summarized into toy lines aka "The new transformers aren't selling" rather then "People just want the voyager class ones"