Kids routinely favor the toy they believe is meant for them, based on their gender. Further research shows the perceived gender of a toy itself can have “significant impact on toy preferences and exploration,” wrote the authors of a 2003 paper, published in the journal Educational Pscychology, about how children play with toys. And babies as young as 18 months old show gender-related behaviors when playing with certain toys, differences that persist throughout childhood. There’s much academic research to back up the notion that girls and boys gravitate toward different toys. Lego had stumbled into a dynamic that’s as familiar as it is controversial the idea that boys and girls, from a very young age, construct starkly divergent worlds for play.
LEGO PLAYSETS HOW TO
They consistently had distinct ideas about how to interact with the same toys they encountered-expectations that seemed to be drawn along gender lines in focus group after focus group.
Namely, Lego found that girls and boys played with Legos differently from one another. Some of the things we heard were really surprising and challenging in ways that weren’t really comfortable for us as a brand.” “We embarked on four years of global research with 4,500 girls and their moms. “Seeing that the play pattern was really skewing so heavily toward boys, we wanted to understand why,” McNally said. In other words, there was a huge untapped market of girls who weren’t building with Legos. In the United States, roughly 90 percent of Lego sets being sold were intended for boys. It was 2008 when the toymaker decided to gather global data about who buys Legos. Years before Charlotte sent her letter, Lego was already keenly focused on how girls perceived the brand. “Why wouldn’t there be more female representation?” “It’s fair,” said Michael McNally, a Lego spokesman who says the company receives letters from kids all the time. Charlotte, Lego acknowledged, had a point.
0 kommentar(er)
