Steven Reece

You know when you really want to get something, but nobody has created it yet?

Well I recently wanted an easy reference tool to allow me to skim read commercial success factors for Board Games…but could not find one.

So, I decided to write my own mini Ebook.

It’s (ironically) entitled Mammon’s Guide To Board Games: 55 Features Of Top Selling Board Games.

It’s a bite sized book, so not one to take on a long journey, but there is no verbosity, just concise distillation of success factors for Board Games. Being a vulgar commercial soul at heart, I have not written about Gameplay, or the social benefits of Board Games, or about aesthetics. No – I have purely written about factors that shift boxes!

It’s currently only available on Kindle via this link  http://www.amazon.com/Mammons-Guide-Board-Games-ebook/dp/B007PJTZN2/ref=nosim?tag=wwwvicientert-20

If you did want to buy it, but don’t have a Kindle, I can supply it as an Ebook I can email to you – just get in touch, steve.reece@vicientertainment.co.uk and I’ll confirm how you can get it.

For anyone who gets it, there are some high value bonuses at the back of the book, which basically relate to me giving you some time/feedback/input for free, hopefully I won’t regret that, but the committment stands regardless!

All the best

Steve

P.S. As a side point, if you don’t have a Kindle, you really should consider getting one – my Kindle has revolutionised my personal reading andbusiness reference reading, it’s that good. Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eReader-eBook-Reader-e-Reader-Special-Offers/dp/B0051QVESA/ref=nosim?tag=wwwvicientert-20 The version this link goes to is the lowest spec version, which I have, which seems more than good enough!

From a personal preference perspective, I really don’t like Facebook Timeline. I find it difficult to process what’s going on with the page – all seems over cluttered.

However, it’s generally a mistake to presume that because I think something, everyone thinks something! The point is all too often in business, we jump to sweeping conclusions, and then find ourselves with egg on our faces because we presumed incorrectly.

So, I read this fantastic survey which dared to contradict my own preferences with interest and a degree of scepticism.

http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2012/03/the-impact-of-facebook-timeline-for-brands-study/

Check it out – because the reality is these are hard TANGIBLE, OBJECTIVE stats, not just someone sticking their finger in the air and deciding which way the wind is blowing!

Be happy to receive your ‘Like’ on our own Facebook Timeline page if you want to reach out…  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vici-Entertainment/237808796279144

All the best

Steve

P.S. Not even using Facebook yet, let alone having a fan page? Worry not, help is at hand – my 21st Century Toy Marketing Academy screens out all the crap, and delivers what works, guaranteed! To find out more & download a Free report in which i answered prominent questions about all this stuff, just go to http://toymarketingacademy.com

Just a quick one – Check out the Trends on Mobile devices / smartphones in this hard hitting presentation.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-mobile-deck-2012-3#-1 

If you don’t have a Marketing plan that considers the impact of Mobile proliferation, you need to develop one, because we are still in the infancy of the smartphone revolution.

Like a rolling snowball, the momentum of Smart Mobile devices is gathering mass at a rate of knots, but it’s yet to get anywhere near it’s full potential.

Quite some while back, I interviewed Max Ford, Managing Director of NPD Toys about his work as a professional Inventor & Inventors rep.

The interview was originally conducted for our sister site: www.RichInventor.com, but I liked it so much I wanted to share it with you here, just click this link and it should start playing:

http://www.richinventor.com/podcast/Rich_Inventor_Podcast%20Edited%20Final.mp3

So, if you want to find out what it’s like working as a professional Toy Inventor, or if you have a product you’d like to get to market, have a listen to this.

Max, and NPD Toys can be found at this URL: http://www.npdtoys.com/

If you found this interview interesting, PLEASE leave a comment below – there is way more work in producing Interviews than spilling out another blog post, so if anybody finds it interesting I will do more, but if it’s a deafening silence back, I’d have to presume nobody was interested

On Sunday it was Mothering Sunday in the UK.

My daughter and I set out to bake a cake for my wife, which of course should literally be a ‘piece of cake’ (groan), but past experience had shown that neither of us was adept at cake making. In fact we had several disastrous attempts previously.

And when my wife gathered from the not so secret, secret whispering between her husband and daughter that we planned another cake, her eyes rolled knowingly.

So to cut a (seemingly) long process short – we made a magnificent cake, and even managed to get it out of the baking tray without destroying it…but then we came to another point we hadn’t previously encountered – the icing, as previous attempts had ended in ignominy before we got to that point.

We got the ratio between water and icing sugar wrong (clearly to be expected as being male I couldn’t look at the instructions).

So rather than being brutal and tipping it out and starting again, we carried on adding icing sugar, but it wouldn’t dissolve, so then we worked out the sugar needed to be dissolved by hotter water, to cut to the end, we used nearly a whole bag of icing sugar, and ended up with a massive mess on the table of overly watery icing.

So what on earth does any of this have to do with Toys, in case you thought you had just hit on a Cooking blog?

Well once we’d seen the funny side, I reflected that our cake baking shenanigans had some similiarities with building Toy Brands:

• When you start you don’t know what you’re doing, so you just try stuff until someone or something proves where you were wrong, then you don’t make that mistake again.
• You can always quit (either the business, product or Category) if things don’t go well at first, or you can take the stance of ‘Well at least I know what won’t work’, and come back stronger next time.
• Having the right components is critical, but knowing hot to put them all together to create the end result is key!
• There’s always someone expecting you to fall flat on your face, or someone glorying in your failures, but you can’t let that stop you from trying!
• Once you know how to do it, you can just keep churning out the good stuff…because creating Toy Brands is all about getting the blend between different elements right.
• The sweet taste of success once you finally get there makes all the trials and tribulations along the way worthwhile.

Following this gastronomically focused Blog posting, normal service will be resumed next time!

All the best

Steve

http://toymarketingacademy.com – your 21st Century Toy Marketing questions answered via Free Guide…

According to a research study conducted by Google, the Online Web economy is set to double between now and 2016, from $2.3 Trillion to $4.6 Trillion in 2016 (G20 Countries).

For more details, check out this summary of the study:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16753902

So that’s all very interesting, but what does it mean for those of us in the Toy trade? Well frankly, it means an awful lot actually!

Aside from the fact that many of our customers are E-commerce customers, and that more and more sales are going Online, it also means that we need to question the ‘Old’ way of doing things.

It also means we need to be aware of what new Online Tools are available to us, how and why they work, and how we can deploy them.

Because while we may feel like we have been Online for a long time, the Internet as a mass market Commercial entity is barely a decade old! We are still in the infancy of the Internet Revolution (and when future generations look back in time, they will view the Internet Revolution with the same awe as we today look at the impact of the Industrial revolution). So yes, the Internet Economy will double between here and 2016, but the growth won’t end there, this magical and monstrous beast will just keep growing and growing for decades to come!

So there is no alternative, other than to embrace the opportunities that this fantastic portal offers, because failing to do so is likely to lead to obsolescence!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your views on the internet & how you use it in your business…:)

All the best

Steve

P.S. Have you downloaded our Free Guide on 21st Century Toy Marketing? I asked Clients and Followers what questions they had about modern marketing, then answered them – just click here to find out more… http://toymarketingacademy.com

Once upon a time, Hollywood didn’t take Toy Industry Brands that seriously…

They, of course, loved the Licensing royalties flowing back from the Toy lines based on their movies, but they certainly didn’t take Toy Brands seriously as potential Movie vehicles.

But ever since Transformers blew the roof off box offices around the world, Hollywood’s mindset has changed.

Like all good commercial sectors, the movie industry has looked at the runaway success of Transformers and decided to see what else they can do with Toy Brands.

And frankly, Brands which once may have seemed to hard to translate, or too spurious a link, are being lined up for production.

Interestingly, the Lego movie which has been at the very start of the Greenlight process with Warner Bros since 2008, has now been slated for 2014 release.

Now to the casual observer, Lego doesn’t seem like an obvious choice, as it’s a very functional Brand in many ways, however, as Lego’s runaway Brand Extension Strategy proves,  the Brand provides a brilliantly flexible platform.

So imagine a world where everything is made from Lego. Imagine millions of Kids and Families around the world sitting through 90 minutes of entertainment content entirely featuring Lego. You could not buy that kind of Brand exposure.

So obviously Lego’s sales forecast can be expected to be significantly higher in 2014, which should help them build on their current momentum nicely.

Having said that though, the potential downside is that they could boost up their sales to such a level that they are reliant on Movie sequels, leaving a potential gap year in between movies, and if the series ends, then they would have to expect sales to drop back.

Clearly much wiser minds than mine run Lego, and will be aware of this, and therefore will take steps to avoid this becoming a problem. And of course as a privately owned company, they don’t have the quarterly pressure on results which listed companies have. So in short, they are likely to benefit significantly, short term due to increased sales and licensing revenue, and longer term because of the sheer Brand awareness impact of the movie.

From the perspective of the Toy Industry as a whole, the scope and scale of the potential for our entire industry is just getting bigger and bigger, due to this movie trend, because once you establish a truly epic Toy brand, the opportunities for exploitation are greater.

All the best

Steve

P.S. Please feedback by adding comment on this page.

P.P.S. If you haven’t already downloaded our Free Guide to 21st Century Toy Marketing, please go to http://toymarketingacademy.com - so far the level of downloads and positive response has been pleasantly surprising!

There is a not so secret Key to success for Toy Companies, which many know, but fewer manage to implement successfully. The Corporate companies get this, and generally do it very well. The non Corporate companies though, often fail to capitalise on the best double payday there is in this industry.

Most non Corporate companies I come across are so focused on the sheer daily grind of Sales, cashflow and the P&L, that they don’t focus on creating true long term value and really solid foundations for their business. This is the treadmill mentioned in the title of this article, and that treadmill can get faster and faster and harder and harder to keep on!

The not so secret Key to success for Toy companies is building their own Brands to as great a scale as they can. The reality is that it isn’t easy to get retail support for non Licensed product with no heritage, and sometimes soft marketing only. But then most things worth having don’t come easily in business.

The trap many companies fall into is the Licensing trap. Now Licensing is a major and fundamental feature of our industry, so in no way am I denigrating what Licensed products bring to the party. The problem for Toy companies though is when they become over dependent on chasing the next hot license, or puts too many or all their eggs into the basket that is utilising somebody else’s intellectual property.

The treadmill effect works by way of giving you a boost in sales for each hot license you add to you range, but Licenses come and go, so it’s ok to make hay while the sun shines, but what happens when the License goes? The biggest downside is when companies have resourced and taken overhead based on Sales boosted by Licenses, that then eventually evaporate, leaving just a bunch of unrecouped MGs, an overblown machine with no critical mass and a lack of profit.

So how should Toy companies manage the need to have Hot Licensed products to ensure retail support / drive sales, with an understanding of and plan for how the business would work post hot Licenses?

The antidote to this is, and always will be, in the first instance is to commit to new overhead with a frugality and conservatism that borders on the ridiculous. But the 2nd part of the antidote is to invest time, effort and money into creating your own Brand I.P., or at the very least, partnering with companies who will give a share of Brand I.P…. because in the long run, 10% profit (if you’re lucky) will take a long time to generate significant wealth for shareholders.

The 1 big payday that established Brands offer, and / or the stability and security they provide to your business on an ongoing basis is something very much worth fighting for.

In the last 18-24 months, we’ve seen a number of companies whose businesses were based on other people’s Brands go under because they had no permanent foundations, and so while there are massive challenges in successfully creating your own Brands, and monstrous barriers to entry for creating IP in some formats (i.e. TV / MMOGs / Movies etc.), to not invest significant focus in creating and owning at least a chunk of  an asset which could be worth $millions or $tens of millions is beyond short sighted…in fact it means you remain on the treadmill with no end in sight…

The companies I’ve worked with who’ve experienced  most success are those who build long term Brand value. Simple as that.

All the best

Steve

P.S. Just to declare my level of objectivity – I’m a Brand Consultant, so of course I think Brand building works…but not based on hope or self interest, it’s because I have personally worked on Brands sold for in excess of $130m…Brands which started as just an idea! As ever, all and any feedback welcomed, good or bad…please add Comments below.

P.P.S. Still offering Free Guide on 21st Century Toy Marketing to ‘de-mist’ Social Media et al… http://toymarketingacademy.com 

My recent posting questioning the efficacy of QR codes received a fiery reception from some ardent supporters of this technology.

I called for proven objective stats showing effective campaigns based on using QR codes, because I have yet to find an example of this technology delivering effective and quantifiable results in any instance (!). That’s not to say that they will never work, I’m sure someone, somewhere will prove the exception to the rule, but for now, this technology is still a pass…

BUT – notice the ‘for now’ in my statement. As smartphones get better, and their built in cameras get better, QR codes will come to the fore based on reality, not hype, but I see that day being at least 12-24 months away at the time of writing, so I do not recommend utilising QR codes in 2012 campaigns.

I’d also like to point out that ALL the people who rebutted my thoughts on QR codes were people with vested interests, i.e. people who sell QR codes to their Clients!

I really, really want someone to come and slap me in the face with a QR code campaign that has proven measurable results that make me go ‘WOW’, and I also want someone to deliver a big and robust research study to show that my hypothesis that QR codes are (currently) so clunky and inefficent due to scanning software & camera limitations, and due to unrealistic load time, is defunct and inaccurate.

But until that point, while the costs to deploy QR codes may not be huge, there is still a cost, and a risk of alienating consumers who otherwise love our Brands.

Once the balance of smartphone functionality tips, there may come a time, but it’s not now…

Finally, there are a whole host of other technologies either in use already or in testing.

Here’s one I quite like – NFC (near field communications).

As ever, the successful Toy & Game marketer investigates, and looks for proven performance & tangible returns, I see that being more likely with NFC right now than with QR…

All the best

Steve

P.S. If you found this interesting and useful, you might want to download the Free Guide at http://www.toyacademy.com, which answers the most common questions about marketing in the 21st Century.

Just a quick post this one – to announce the launch of my all new 21st Century Toy Marketing Academy.

http://toymarketingacademy.com

To cut a long story short – I have always loved the Internet, having been online since 1993, and launching www.MyMonopoly.com with Hasbro as long ago as 2001.

And basically I started to get really cross about the smoke and mirrors that goes along with all these new media tools we have nowadays. Having been ripped off myself, and seeing others be ripped off, or wasting money on marketing that was never going to work, I decided to create my version of an antidote:   http://toymarketingacademy.com

Basically, if you go to the site, there is a Free Guide which answers the questions I was given by Clients and followers. If you download the Free Guide, I’ll send you some more stuff on 21st Marketing Academy, and eventually my email chain will ask you if you want to join the Academy…excuse the blatant pushiness of both this post and the web pages I’ve setup for the Academy, but basically I’ve just used what works, and thought if you weren’t interested you would just opt out…

In essence, my conclusion is there are relatively few secrets in the modern Marketing world, we sometimes just need  a guide who has been there and done it to cut through all the crap out there…if you think I could be your guide, here’s the link http://toymarketingacademy.com

If you aren’t interested, no problem – normal service will be resumed shortly on this Blog