A long, long time ago, in a galaxy called the 80s, Kenner toys were leading the boys toys market with Star Wars. The franchise was the ultimate piece of content marketing to shift plastic action figures, and brands were forced to compete with the Lucas-licensed giant.
Mattel wanted a piece of Kenner’s empire, and made several deals to get the licensing for movie franchises of their own, obtaining the rights to titles like; Clash of the Titans, and Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately these movies were nowhere near as big as Star Wars, the licensing costs were sky high and Mattel never earned out of the royalties.
What makes matters worse is that Mattel had first dibs on Star Wars action figures and turned the deal down!
If they were going to turn a profit, they’d need an IP of their own, and so ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ was born. It was a triumph, surpassing expectations and achieving $38million in its first year - smashing their promised $13million target.
At the height of popularity, the toy line reached a peak of $400million, and even outsold Mattel's biggest star Barbie!
Here's five way Mattel absolutely nailed it and held the power in boys toys:
1) They listened to their audience
Mattel knew they needed to innovate and so the cavalry was called in - the marketing team.
Marketing held focus groups with their target consumer, the five year old boy, to discover what they liked about existing toys, and how they played with them.
They discovered that five year old boys didn’t want to be told what to do, they wanted to be in charge and they wanted to have the power. The word power was used over and over again, and Mattel executives took note, becoming a key component of the Master’s universe.
They looked at the types of toys they could design from; policemen and spacemen to soldiers, and the standout favourite was the barbarian. They made their barbarian bigger and more muscular than the other action figures on the market, and gave He-Man a power stance with a powerful facial expression. In contrast action figures like Star Wars were stood stiffly to attention with blank expressions.
Just like that they’d spotted a gap in the market, and a way to differentiate their offering to stand out from the competition.
2) They used existing tools
Creating a new line of toys isn’t cheap, especially when you haven’t proven its success and have suffered several failed attempts at innovating.
So when the initial tooling budget ran out, and they needed a vehicle for He-Man to get about with, Mattel looked at what was already available in their arsenal and reused a tool from their ‘Big Jim’ line. They took a tiger, painted it green, added orange stripes and a saddle.
3) They improved until they got it right
‘Power’ became the beating heart of the Master’s universe, and the team wanted to champion this in their name, originally calling their toy line - ‘Lords of Power’. The Mattel big wigs hated the name, dubbing it ‘too religious’ sounding, and ‘Masters of the Universe’ was introduced at the 11th hour.
The team played around with their toy line too; retexturing Beast Man as the original looked too much like a Wookiee ripoff, and remoulding their play-set ‘Castle Grayskull’ when the tall toys couldn’t fit through the original castle’s mouth.
4) They listened to their customers
Mattel kept their ears open to their customers too, after being challenged by the no.2 toy retailer, Child World, with a question along the lines of “Star Wars has a movie, what do you have?”. Thinking quickly on their feet, they combated with an off the cuff - ‘a free comic book included with the toys’, and that promise was enough to secure the deal.
But, the challenges from customers didn’t end there. No.1 toy retailer, Toys“R”Us weren’t content with the comic books, and in a make or break promise, one of the executives blurted out “did we not tell you about the 2x one hour TV specials”?
To make good on their promise, Mattel set up a meeting with Filmation, a company synonymous with Saturday morning cartoons. Filmation agreed to make a He-Man show, but instead of the 2x one hour specials, they created a full series - and it was a big hit, raking in the views and helping shift millions of figurines.
5) They refreshed their content
To keep their line fresh, and keep kids wanting more, Mattel continued to introduce new characters. They even introduced a female alternative with ‘She-Ra and the Princesses of Power” after noticing 20% of their He-Man consumers were female, this too came with its own TV show.
Over the years He-Man has been refreshed multiple times for newer generations of boys, revamping the toy line and the TV series along the way.
So remember kids, with great marketing comes great POWER!
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