Beats me but it's when I entered the game.

Transformers '07 (the movie) was the bait, but then Revenge of the Fallen (the toyline) was the hook. Plus that was when IDW started to seem like it had legs.

 

"It's insecurity run rampant..." say the guys afraid their childrens toys may start appealing to women.

Which in itself is funny. All this panic over kids losing interest and a dying fanbase...and then you've got women saying "Hey, maybe if they paid more attention to us they'd be selling better with women..." and a bunch of dudes start shouting "NO IT'S FINE THAT'S HOW TOYS WORK GO PLAY WITH BARBIE!"

 

Same. The '07 movie put it back on my radar, and the ROTF toyline was when things looked interesting enough to start buying.

 

things aren't g1 enough......yeah I said it.........



J/K
......hahahahaha you people kill me getting all pissy about this stuff.

 

In many cases, yes. Continuing to label them as boy/girl actually does have a profound influence on how many people perceive them.

It's not the store's fault that parents might not be open minded, but they could do more to help break down the stereotypes.

 

Says the guy who doesn't care when his son plays tea with his sister or when his daughter plays with his son and his action figures.

You've missed the whole point. People need to start thinking for themselves, enjoying what they like, and stop getting butt hurt over corporate marketing methods.

Do you really think with all the money these companies spend on marketing departments and demographics info and focus groups they don't who buys their product? Do you really think they've missed out on some segment and they have no idea? If it was worth marketing more to women they would. They're numbers say money and time is better spent marketing along classic gender roles.

 

Their numbers said Kylo Ren would be the hit of the latest Star Wars film

Turns out people wanted Rey toys instead and Hasbro is being taken to the cleaners in every news media in the world because of it

Marketting gurus are idiots who are trying to capture something in numbers that you can't. They are useless and every company should just fire them

 

Yeah I guess stupid people need big corporate to tell them what their kids should play with.

Stores could do more to break down stereotypes? Wow, just wow. Your "stereotypes" are other people's "the way things should be". You do realize that stores are in it to make money not push social agendas?

 

Fair enough - I originally was gonna use Streetwise/Deadend as the example anyways   G1 Bumblebee/Cliffjumper/Hubcap/Bumper is a good historical and sample of reshelling.

 

Well, alright then. I see now that there's no point in continuing this discussion.

 

Are you serious with this?

Didn't Hasbro just tell investors how good they did with Star Wars? Oh a bunch of agenda driven news outlets know better and say they could of done so much better with more Rey merchandise.

Really get rid of marketing departments because they are useless. How do you even justify this statement. Marketing is proven to work and work well.

 

One of the greatest misfires in toy history is precisely an example of why trying to appeal to an unusual demographic outside of the target market...is the infamous and now house-mortgage-worthy-value Lionel's Girl Train from 1957, which I would say is prime time for decisive separation of what boys and girls like and don't like.



The reason this set was a failure at market? Girls didn't like it being bright pastel colors - colors that real trains never had.

Where the problem lies with the logic of trying to appeal to different demographics, is that companies constantly overshoot with these idiotic assumptions of what boys and girls uniquely like, ignoring the fact they were buying the original product as it was, often for reasons the "revised" versions will lose.

Hasbro somehow both understand and doesn't understand this - the former was demonstrated with the successful "Rebelle" series of NERF guns, which were essentialy the same toys except with more pink and girly imagery on the stickers. But it worked because NERF guns were already bright neon colors and for all the flowers and hearts, the Rebelle guns fired the same darts like all NERF weapons, so the reason they liked the guns in the first place was still there.

But the latter...well, let me put it this way: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic had a massive success from the moment it launched by finding a market both in the young girls demographic as well as the adult aged market.

It's taken them six years to figure out that the latter market is more likely to buy pony toys if they were actually toys with basic articulation.

 

You make some assumptions on the Rebelle line, don't you? I'm saying, without actual data (or recollections of actual conversations with the customers), it's hard to say exactly why the Rebelle line succeeded. My  ?

Rebelle PAID ATTENTION TO GIRLS. It's a simple matter of selling things to boys for so long that you forget that girls ALSO like to run around and play. WOW!  

The big problem is that a lot of the gender differences (like pastel trains) are not inherent: they're socially engineered cow patties that are as arbitrary as they are stupid. For example, in pioneer America days (i.e. the Old West), RED was the boy color for babies, as it connoted passion (whereas blue was reserved for girls, in favor of promoting tranquility). COMPLETELY ARBITRARY. What do we choose for baby boys today? Does it make any sense? Why is it insulting to paint a boy toy pink?  

The real success story is about listening to your customers' needs and interests - sometimes, as with the girl market, maybe it just boils down to actually LISTENING. And for that matter, let's remove some of the gender restrictions that say girls cannot play with guns...   More girls (and moms?) might actually buy product if they weren't too ashamed to enjoy the product - a symptom of societal views placing rigid restrictions on genders. And that's not as big an obstacle as it seems: many consumer products introduced new life styles and options for people (i.e. cigarettes, coffee, listerine, treadmills, the list goes on and on). Savvy companies with money (i.e. Hasbro?) CAN change societal views toward things like gender roles and which toys are for which gender. It just takes some marketing skill and investment (which admittedly is probably not at the forefront of corporate concerns during these tough economic times).

Also, Hunger Games was a big reason Rebelle succeeded.   (Lots of factors, and the girly flower designs is probably not significant in the way you think - I hypothesize it simply made the "girl" nerf unique and different from the boy nerf, and hence desirable in a boys-not-allowed way  ).

 

Oh please do elaborate...

 

 

What's there to elaborate on? Some people like to buy their kids toys based on tradional gender roles and like the store organized in such a fashion. Nothing evil, just personal preference.

 

No, thats not what happened. What has happened is a few people are given a large voice online about Rey missing from certain toy sets and the toy makers acquiesced. Mainly because her absence was a bad decision.

But that doesn't equate to them being wrong about Kylo Ren, and it certainly doesn't equate to Rey being a character that they wanted more if than Kylo Ren. They just wanted her included more than she was and especially where her inclusion was relevant.

Marketing is about interpretation, and your interpretation of what happened with the outcry for Rey simply being missing from certain toy sets and exaggerating that to mean the market wanted more Rey than Kylo Ren certainly doesn't reflect that you are an expert that should be criticizing any marketing professional.

 

um

Have you not... Looked at the news? I like your "Agenda-driven thing", which is hilarious, but it actually got out of the Internet sphere and into offline news. You can label that "Agenda driven" all you want, but guess what? Its out there and that's what people think.

As for why? Because figuring out what's popular isn't a science, and they're getting paid for wild predictions. Like, that train, a few posts above? You just know some market exec has gone "Ah, girls, girls toys are in pastel colours, let's make a train in those colours and sell it TO GIRLS". And it failed

 

Wow, that sure was some fun Internet debating, but how about we talk something entirely different.

I've been looking at the CybertronCon logo - that whole slide, actually. The logo features Chinese characters. The slide seemsto only referencesChinese media outlets. I'd say this provides strong evidence that this con is not the replacement for BotCon.

 

I do. However, I follow actual news sites and not just tumblr/Twitter.

To clarify: yes, some media outlets reported on it, but it was in the "huh, a few people are upset about this" sort of reporting. Nothing like an actual PR nightmare.