Being Geek Chic is the yammerings of a Midwestern nerd named Elizabeth Giorgi. My vision impairment is real, which is frustrating because I really would like to see a 3D movie.

Send questions, requests and ideas to [email protected]. Please put your complaints on a napkin and toss it.

• Note

  20th December 2011

  LEGO Friends: A LEGO Fail?

  LEGO announced that they’re coming out with a new line of toys for girls: LEGO Friends. This is their fifth attempt to launch a product for girls, most of the time relying on the very basic marketing idea that girls like pink.

  Here’s what’s different: The standard minifig is gone and is replaced with a girl minifig. Of course, with the requisite oversized eyes, colored lips and boobs too. Apparently, she’s also having a cocktail in a pool in the set at left.

  Why the change?

  According to NPR:

  While boys and girls both love to build, boys build in a linear fashion, assembling the kits from start to finish and not stopping until the toy looks like what’s on the cover of the box.

  In contrast, girls like to stop along the way, and start role-playing while they are building. So … Lego bagged the girls’ toys differently, so they can begin playing before finishing the whole model.

  Aha, so girls hate building. Apparently they hated the minifig as well:

  The researchers found that girls do not like the iconic, chunky Lego minifigure. So the company designed a new one that’s slightly bigger than the traditional 1 1/2-inch figure, to make it easier for girls to put hairbrushes and handbags in the minifigures’ hands.

  Here’s an idea: perhaps it wasn’t about hairbrushes and handbags or even the ability to role play along the way. Maybe, just maybe, it’s about broader issues related to the packaging and marketing of LEGO. Think back to last month when the sets with Wonder Woman and Catwoman hit the Internet. The images are set up in role playing scenarios and in this case: the women need saving. Perhaps, the roles LEGO is identifying for young female users don’t resonate? Where’s the set with Wonder Woman kicking ass? Are they afraid that boys won’t want a set with Catwoman chasing after the bad guy?

  It’s no surprise that I love LEGO and that I have a fairly extensive collection. As a child, I loved to build and role play with the pieces I shared with my brother. I distinctly remember that my biggest complaint as a child of the 80s wasn’t that my LEGO minifig couldn’t have a hairbrush or a handbag: it was that the only hair option was a long, blonde piece and I had brown hair. Things have changed since then, but wouldn’t it have been great of LEGO to include Ginny Weasley in the LEGO Harry Potter Quidditch set? Last I checked, Ginny was a badass Chaser and far outperforms Oliver Wood in terms of name recognition. Could they have been bothered to include at least one female astronaut, policewoman, firefighter, pirate, ANYTHING in one of the hundreds of sets where she isn’t an accessory to the action - just sitting there holding a surfboard or drinking a coffee?

  LEGO: You claim that girls don’t visually respond to the colors in your sets or don’t like the minifig. If the key is that girls are visual and they respond to things like color and images and instructions, well, I challenge you: Would girls also visually respond to scenes they can relate to and aspire to in the products you already produce and sell? Maybe you could help them with their role playing by giving them scenes that include girls in the action instead of placing them off to the side with a cup of coffee.

  It’s not all bad with LEGO Friends. They’ve produced one set I can give props to: Olivia’s Inventor Workshop.

  Does it balance out the fashion design, dog show, pool party, bakery, beauty shop and convertible sets? No, but they made the effort. Right?

  I’m making a prediction: LEGO Friends, like their previous 5 attempts, will fail. It may be popular temporarily, but like Bratz and the countless other oversized-eyeballed, prematurely breasted female figurines of the 2000s, they will fall by the wayside while your main brand continues to grow and expand and reach into generation after generation of young children. The reason? LEGO is something you keep. It’s a toy that you don’t sell at a garage sale or drop off at the Goodwill, because you look forward to sharing it with your child some day. It’s not built on gimmicks and so it endures. This is a gimmick.

  When this fails, I suggest LEGO stop before throwing millions of dollars at more research about girls, their desires for handbags and their color preferences and instead research the products sitting right before their eyes. There’s plenty of opportunity there.

  LEGO Rant marketing toys
  1. keepyoungandbeautiful reblogged this from lifeandcode and added:

     Because girls like pink, and sitting around.

  2. unforeseen-circumstances reblogged this from lifeandcode
  3. lifeandcode reblogged this from jerriann and added:

     I don’t have a big enough font size of Comic Sans to express how lame I think this is.

  4. jerriann reblogged this from beinggeekchic
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