On Saturday, while fighter jets swooped and dove over Lake Michigan during the Air and Water Show, some families took a break from the crowded lake shore to play with Legos at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Kicking off a 23-city tour known as the Lego Experience, which will wrap up on November 1 at the Wings Over Houston Air Show, the promotion aims to "either reacquaint, reintroduce, or introduce the brand to new consumers," said Vince Rubino, manager of marketing events at Lego Systems Inc., adding that the promotion's target audience is families with children between the ages of four and 12.
Rubino noted that the goal of the event is not to spread brand awareness, something he said the company already has. "Ninety-eight percent of people out there know Lego," he said. "So we're not looking for brand exposure. [With this promotion] we're looking to provide a brand experience." To achieve that, the tour employs a series of tents with different activities that "allow people to get the brand in their hands, start playing with the bricks, and realize 'Oh, I forgot how much fun Lego is,'" Rubino said.
In one tent, families are invited to compete against one another in timed Lego-construction challenges; another tent houses a table piled with loose Lego bricks, where individuals can build whatever comes to mind. "We have a pretty well-formulated plan of what we want the experience to be," Rubino said. "We fill a large table with loose bricks, and just ask people to come in and use their imaginations to build something. And that's entertainment galore. So we don't have to really work too hard and over-think this."
Throughout the promotion, two teams of brand representatives—an East Coast and a West Coast team—will hit up state fairs, air shows, and other large festivals in cities such as San Diego, Minneapolis, and Phoenix. Although Rubino and his team placed calendar listings in various city newspapers and dedicated a Facebook page and a blog to the promotion, "We're not taking a very heavy advertising approach to this," he said. "We've found that when we do advertise heavily for [our] events, we get a lot of Lego enthusiasts coming. We're trying to introduce ourselves to newer or broader audiences, so what we've done instead is say we're going to go to largely attended, large-scale venues and rely on walk-by traffic."
Rubino said that he and his team will look to attendance to measure the promotion's success. Brand reps are still crunching numbers from the weekend's event and won't determine average attendance until November. "We'll rely on the venues to tell us attendance [in each city]," he said, explaining that he and his team won't ask guests to sign in with their email addresses at each site because Committee On Political Action regulations prevent Lego and other toy companies from doing so. "We also have our team do a head count at the site every 15 minutes to half an hour, so we try to come up with a good ballpark," he said. Additionally, the company has a Lego Club, a free magazine subscription which consumers can subscribe to online. "That's another metric we can track—how many people sign up for the club—to measure the tour's success," Rubino said.
The tour marks the first time in six years that Lego is putting on a promotion of this kind, and Rubino said the reason for rolling the event out now lies in the company's current success. "We're in a pretty unique position right now in that our sales are phenomenal," he said. "We're one of the few—if not the only—toy companies that has seen double-digit consumer sales in a tight economy. So we look at this as the time not to rest on our laurels but to go out there and try to get more consumers. TV commercials are still king with kids, and we know that. But we also know the strength of doing these live events, and of people just getting the Lego bricks in their hands."
