The Hindu Business Line : Toy story

IT began innocently enough with a t-shirt with DragonBall Z icons on it that soon became the most worn piece of apparel in my son's wardrobe. Then, insidiously, we found ourselves haunted by little poltergeists, with strange names like Pikachu or Charmander or Jigglytuf. They were everywhere. In trading cards. On the TV. In CDs and DVDs. As free promos with juices, candies. The worst part was, there was an infinite progression of the pesky beasts. As my son informed me, with just that tinge of amazed scorn that kids use with ignorant mothers, they kept evolving. There was even an expensive handbook to ensure that every little boy could rattle off details on every single genus with utter ease. If the same passion was brought to schoolwork, we would have a nation of child prodigies. For a long while now, Pokemons have been the bane of every mother's existence.

Now it's the turn of the Beyblade. It's a top. No, seriously, it's just a top. Except this top has the hypnotic, addictive ability to take a bunch of reasonably sensible boys and convert them into acquisitive, hyper-competitive gamers with a strong attack of the "gimmes." All mothers know about the "gimmes." It's that pleading, desperate note in which your child communicates that life as he knows it will come to a miserable end if you don't buy him that thingy. You resist. He pleads. You waver. Then you take a look at the other mothers around, all of whom are balefully waiting for you to take the fall ... after all, they did ... and you succumb. And life is never the same again.

So, what's with this magical top? Okay, it's a bit more hi-tech than those ones of our youth: you remember them? Hand-carved blobs of wood with a sharpened nail at the end, and the accompanying bit of cord? Descended from that modest pedigree, the Beyblade has gone far beyond, in both technology and marketing. Beyblades are customisable `battle' tops (3 cm tall, 6 cm wide). Each comes with a DIY assembly instruction and is built from five different parts. Unlike the cotton cords of yore which actually needed some expertise to send those wooden versions spinning, these come with a geared ripcord and a launcher that ensure that every novice is in the game from the word "rip."

They dismantle them, they combine the parts to create new customised versions, they swap them (there are too many different versions to be owned by one kid) and they spin them. Endlessly. Every where you can see tense huddles of boyhood watching intently as their blades collide and crash into each other. On the ground, in a saucepan, on ice, in water.

And as I clutch my head in a feeble attempt to get that screechy sound out, I wonder: what makes the Japanese so marvellous at viral marketing? I can't help but compare this craze to the grossly inadequate toy collection movements of our youth. Remember the little Binaca animals? Or the aeroplane stickers from A1 chewing gum wrappers? None of them came close to this mania.

Consider this. According to one estimate, by 2004, over 100 million Beyblades had been sold around the world. This souped up spinning top took its maker, Takara, laughing all the way to the bank. After a loss in the year 2000, Takara grew on the phenomenal success of Beyblade to touch a whopping $1 billion by 2004, with a net income of nearly $8 million.

Where Beyblade scores is through some superbly orchestrated marketing. For one, it understood the atavistic male need for action and competition. It created a competitive sport in which no special expertise or talent is needed. Add to that a proposition that removes built-in obsolescence: with over 60 (and growing) models that can be mixed and matched to form infinite combinations, you can continually stoke the acquisitive spirit. (More gimmes!) As Takara says, they have zeroed in on a toy that "satisfies every boy's urges to battle, customise, and collect." Keeping the momentum high is an edgy anime cartoon that ensures persistent top-of-mind presence. Not to mention the tournaments that give it street-cred. In the 2002 World Championship, over 20,000 participants vied worldwide, 5,600 were selected, of which some 500 would take part in the final tourney. That hasn't come to India. Yet.

Takara's is a fascinating case study in improbable innovation and risk-taking. Takara's mission has been to create `life entertainment' products, which must fulfil the criteria of "being unique, having an element of fantasy and bringing fun into the everyday lives of both adults and children." Takara's success wave began with a simple question they kept asking people: "What do you really — really — want to do?" and its willingness to wager big money on the answer. Their pipeline definitely testifies to amazing creativity. It first made a turnaround with the banana-phone - yes, that's a cell-phone shaped like a banana. Hits include a security camera that follows intruder movement but isn't connected to anything; a motorised home beer tap called `Let's Beer Great,' and Gorgeous Bath, a lion's-head bathtub fountain. The e-Kara karaoke, a popular home karaoke unit which simply plugs into a television set, was at least within the realms of visualisation. Then, came, hold your breath, the Bowlingual, a dog-language translator, which uses voice-print analysis to translate barks into English. The range includes the Cat Attack (which uses chaos theory and complex systems to simulate the movements and personality of a cat's favourite prey), a life-sized Penny Racer car, the Aquaroids (a line of robotic, voice-activated marine creatures), and a helium-powered dirigible called The Sky Ship.

Ironically, Takara also offers lessons on growth gone awry. Riding the wave of hits, the company from around 2002 went on a M&A acquisition spree, going beyond its traditional toy business, buying a consumer electronics maker and a car accessories firm. The fallout: resources stretched too thin, a loss of focus on its main toy business, leading to the drying up of the toy pipeline. Add to this the value erosion due to knock-offs, and you begin to understand how such a successful innovator could land in the position of expecting a net loss this year. It's picking up its socks now, with a doll fashioned after a pop star.

All this makes me wonder. Why are we, with one of the largest populations of kids, importing our kiddy-crazes? Why is there simply no Indian toy with the potential to fire the young imagination like this? It's not as if we don't have our own national crazes. The national answer to "What would you really, really like to do?" would be "films" or "cricket." Why are these not being parlayed into toys? Why, for instance, do we not have a Bollywood Star series: I can just see hordes of girls combing the luxurious tresses of a miniature Aishwarya Rai or of Shah Rukh Khan forming the desi answer to Ken. Or, for that matter, a tiny motorised cricket game, complete with the miniature versions of Dravid or Tendulkar. Why are we not able to observe and develop this iconic potential, instead of outsourcing our kids' entertainment?

Takara began with a licence of Hasbro's GI Joe (which, not surprisingly, didn't work in post-war Japan!) and flipped this failure into a success by creating Henshin Cyborg, a clear-plastic doll pressed from the same injection mould. Flash forward to 2002, and it was Takara's Beyblade that helped revive Hasbro's fortunes with a licence agreement. Perhaps it's not so far-fetched, then, to visualise a robust toy market born out of Indian sensibilities, which we could, one day, export to Japan? I believe Rajnikant is very popular there ...

(The writer is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name for the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
The Korean juggernaut

Toy story

`People don't have time to watch bad advertising'

Subhas Ghosal Foundation

Ratings research

It's all in the bones

Consider return on relationship investment