Leave Something To The Imagination.
Maybe this is where we as consumers are missing a trick. Too many toys do all the work of imagination for the kids, actually making them less imaginative not brighter. Every subsequent toy has to be more and more exciting as a result, whereas the kid just becomes an observer to the next fifty quids-worth of mass produced plastic as opposed to the designer of their own little piece of genius.
Someone making an observation about his baby's infatuation with a toilet-roll. An observation that has implications for marketing, communication and product development.
posted by john dodds @ 12:15 AM
7 Comments:
It's partly an adoption of many American brash ideas, where subtlety is lost in a mesh of powwwwwwer!
Kids have imaginations though, they should be encouraged.
I'm not sure it's got any particular national specificity Rob and personally I like a lot of American ideas and people.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday. She is the Mum of a 4 & 1/2 Year old boy. She was telling me that she has bought him all sorts of toys, including 4 up-to-date games consoles. What is the little boy's favourite?
Coathangers.
He loves them, can't get enought of them. He is a normal kid, and normal kids have big imaginations. Coathangers are the frame for his boyish imaginings.
I reckon that is awesome!
I love this post - infact I've just written something similar for tomorrow on my ranting rubbish.
In my experience, brands - child focused or not - achieve much more when they treat their audience with some sort of brains ... whether that is letting them and their imagination run riot or simply allowing them to decide their own 'ending' for what they've seen.
This 'spoon feeding' mentality is both stunting our development and driving brands, as you say, to have to go to ever increasing lengths to make things more 'exciting'.
Create a framework for whatever you want to express and let them do the rest ... half the time they find things far more exciting than you could ever hope to come up with.
John: I agree of course there are a lot of good ideas and people in the US.
But you only have to look at the influence of the toy manufacturers and cartoons (Transformers, HeMan, Turtles, etc in the 80s/90s) in the growth of the past few generations to see the brashness of America influencing kids. Programmes created purely to sell toys, all Action Man!
I like.
This post reminded me of the rise of CGI in monster movies. Movies used to be scary because you were always waiting for the monster to appear.
Then monsters just started appearing straight away and the suspense was gone.
Often, what 'might be' is more thrilling than what is.
Expectation and serendipity are all about that and in respect of movies I totally agree. It's why Alien is a great movie and Aliens is just a space western.
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