Quote:
Originally Posted by Commandoclone87
it still won't solve our primary problem. This yellow plague that keeps store shelves occupied and prevents new figures from being stocked.
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This, plus more. To me, the big failures of DOTM were not the toys but the management issues.
Sure, there were toys that were not so great. That's true of every toyline. And there were toys that were great, though maybe not quite as many standouts. I don't see that the quality of toys changed all
that much.
The big problem to me was distribution, timing, and assortments. These were all
terrible. HA, both large and small scale, were botched. The large size was killed by a shelfwarming first wave. The small size doomed by massive overstock of characters nobody knew because they weren't from the movie.
We see this theme recur in the mainline toys. A movie line filled with toys that weren't in a single frame. This is
incompetent marketing and planning. To top it all off, figures that did appear in the movie were designed, developed, and then cancelled. The decision making and product planning is so grossly inept that you could tell me Hasbro was trying to kill Transformers from within and
it would make more sense than anything else. If you were asked to run the brand into the ground, could you have done better than DOTM? How clueless can you be to take this movie, which did better than anyone was expecting, and turn box office gold into retail lead?
The incompetence has spilled over into Prime with the great FE line cancelled in a bungling that ought to have heads rolling. Hasbro's only running change is to start shortpacking things in every wave, which I see as a desperate move to mobilize collectors and move product (what FE was
supposed to do).
I still don't even understand what Hasbro is thinking. Why spend the money to do different versions of the same characters (FE vs RiD)? Why develop all these figures and then oversaturate with the absolute worst one? Why adopt a strategy whose main effect seems to be to alienate everyone -- collectors, consumers, retailers alike?
In short, DOTM may be gone, but the seeming insanity remains, with the new wrinkle that the product you actually want may be more difficult than ever to find.
