LEGO x Build Your Escape
Bringing a new category to market, LEGO for adults
Insight
Adult audiences don’t want to play. They want to escape. LEGO isn’t a toy, but a colouring book for grown-ups. We can win this segment over by maturing our communication, intersecting audience interests and reinforcing the importance of escape from routine.
Background
In 2019-20, LEGO began investing heavily in growing the demand space for products for adult builders. This included a change in product strategy and the development of 40+ products each year that were designed exclusively for adult consumer audiences. To support this launch, it was necessary to develop a bold new communications platform to communicate with this audience. An audience who, until now, had largely been ignored by the brand.
This campaign was a pilot, originally focused on the UK market, to identify whether appetite and product demand could be provoked by direct to consumer communication.
Strategy
To succeed in communicating to adults, LEGO needs to combat two key challenges - relevance and awareness. Adults perceive LEGO as a toy, and toys are for kids. And even if they do think LEGO is something they might like to buy for themselves, we have another considerable barrier to entry - LEGO sits in the toy aisle.
Therefore, from a shopper perspective, we can’t rely on adult consumers stumbling across our products incidentally. We needed an idea that was deliberate, direct, and it had to be an idea that would change the existing perception of the product.
My initial strategic research looked into the adult activity segment. I analysed the rise of relaxation activities, including adult colouring books, the resurrection of the jigsaw puzzle, and also deliberate escapism apps such as Calm.
Search behaviours identified that our audience - the LEGO audience - are constantly searching for zen. Most of our audience were middle-income to high-income office workers, who were actively looking for an escape from the mundane. An excuse to close their inbox and dig their teeth into something else.
The creative brief was to challenge the team to reposition LEGO as a tool for relaxation. An opportunity for adults to unwind and find their zen. An escape and a departure from the chaos of everyday life.
Execution
Beyond Comms
Our strategy took us beyond traditional communication tactics, as we looked closely at the distribution of our adult products, with an eye to take LEGO beyond the toy aisle. Supporting our ATL campaign, we ran commercial pilots of pop-up retail units in new locations throughout stores, and experimented with LEGO being placed alongside board games and jigsaw puzzles.
This tactic demonstrated a new-found ability to intercept adults with LEGO in unpredictable places, and showcase our escapism proposition to those who wouldn’t normally be exposed to our messaging.
Results
The Build Your Escape campaign was an overwhelming success.
In addition to achieving the highest ROAS (return on advertising spend) of any LEGO campaign for the year, we also had enormous success across earned media, with more than 60 media outlets in the United Kingdom picking up on our message to adults. This included coverage in print and digital editions of The Drum, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail.
The campaign was so successful that additional LEGO markets beyond the UK chose to run the campaign. The same creative was run in additional English speaking markets, including the United States, Singapore and Australia throughout 2020.
The Build Your Escape brand platform continues to be used across the adults portfolio today.