Why is Lego not clicking with customers?By Tom Espiner Business reporter, BBC News
11 min ago
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43300087Lego's latest set of annual numbers showed its first drop-off in profits and revenues for 13 years this week.After the Danish toy-maker turned itself around more than a decade ago, last year it failed to click with customers.
It said it had produced too many bricks, and had to sell off excess stock at a discount.
How can Lego have too many bricks? Isn't it just that it didn't manage to sell the sets it had produced?In a way, yes. Every year it forecasts how much Lego it thinks it will need to manage its production, and last year its forecast wasn't on the money.
Though to be fair, for the previous 13 years it has consistently underestimated how much it would need to produce, and hasn't made enough stock, says Frederique Tutt, global toy industry analyst at the NPD Group.
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Has Lego lost its imagination? Are the pieces getting too specific?It's a bit harsh to say Lego has lost its imagination, says Ms Tutt. The toy industry like every other is cyclical, and after 13 years it's "fair enough to say it can have a rest", she says.
As for the pieces being too specific,
she says today's children "like to be taken by the hand" rather than being given a set of generic blocks, and that themed sets have been "a driver of success" for Lego.However, in 2017 there "was a bit too much of Star Wars, not just in Lego, but everywhere", she says. After three years of successive marketing the market was slightly saturated, she says.
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