Quote:
Originally Posted by Sideslap
Personally I love the complexities of the transformations and hate how we have to dumb them down because our children are getting stupider (hence my original point) I find it a satisfying challenge to remember every single transformation of each figure in my collection. One could say it's a form of brain training in a society that's constantly trying to dumb us down.
|
I agree with this, which is why I don't have an issue with the complexity of transformation. I do have an issue of aiming products at inappropriate markets, which isn't good for anyone.
Battle Ops Bee and Ultimate Prime. I like them. But they are not appropriate for young kids, and I don't see anyone (Hasbro, retailers, employees) doing anything to really
educate consumers. They simply point parents at the biggest, most expensive toys and let them decide. That would be fine it it were an informed decision, but many times it's not.
This is a bad thing because no one ends up happy. A kid who might end up liking Transformers (and joining us here one day) could instead be horribly turned off because the toy is too complicated and the kid literally
can't transform it. Neither can the parents.
This is not a failure of the toy. But parents aren't going to magically know better without
education. The tiny difficulty indicator is not enough. Many parents will be making the decision of whether or not to get the toy right there in the store based on what they see and how overwhelmed they are. Many are not going to look past finding the largest Bee and/or Prime, or know that they even
should take a second look.
I ran into parents yesterday at TRU. They wanted a Leader sized Prime. The store employee said they didn't have any, but would get some in later this week (yeah, right). So instead they picked up a Leader Bee. They didn't even look at complexity. I ended up helping them out.
I'd say these were reasonably informed people -- they were familiar with TFs and understood what they wanted. But there were multiple failures here. They didn't know coming into the store what was available. They got no help from the store employee, who was clueless. They got no help from the store, which had product all over the place. You can bet that if they did magically find a Leader Prime, the last thing they would do is put it back because of a dinky difficulty indicator.
Lego (for instance) makes it relatively obvious by product line, packaging, and well-marked age indicators. The Technic line is for serious builders. Hasbro has different Transformer lines too, but once you get out of the kiddy league, it's all one monolithic thing, even though the toys themselves range from easy to frickin' insanely complicated.
We are super-informed customers, but we have to remember that most people in the store would not understand that size is not the only difference between Leader Sentinel Prime and Voyager Sentinel Prime, and just because it's big and flashy doesn't mean it's a better idea for every kid.
Again, I don't think it's a bad idea to play up the difficulty with more adult packaging, large stickers that proclaim it as challenging, or other clues that the toy may not be suitable for everyone, but is a great thing for the right audience. Since
Hasbro does not do a great job with commercials, they have to educate at point of sale, and they need to be doing a better job of this. It's better in the long run because you end up with more satisfied customers, and customers who come back for more instead of customers who pass you by because they were disappointed last year and ended up donating a half-transformed thing to Value Village.
