Sex and your children's toys

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 28, 2012 

Determined to be equal-opportunity parents, we made sure that my son and daughter had access to gender-free toys right from the start.

But well before they were a year old, my daughter had pushed away the toy car and blocks, clutching for the doll. While my son, on seeing his first truck, drew it to his breast and held on to it for days.

Yep, gender preferences are nature, not just nurture. And anyone who says different has not brought up baby boys and girls.

A recent survey quizzed more than 4,000 children aged six to 12 in Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China, the U.S., and here in Australia.

It's important that marketers reaching for children understand the differences - and the growing similarities - between boys and girls.

The study, conducted by global brand agency The Marketing Store Worldwide, found that many differences seem cemented into the genes, regardless of geography, language and culture. These tend to be the "traditional" toys.

Nor surprisingly 55 per cent of girls chose a doll as their favourite toy. But less than two percent of boys. On the other hand, sure enough there are the trucks - 40 per cent of the boys chose building and construction toys as their favourites. Girls never found the same soft spot for bricks and wheels with only 10 per cent selecting construction.

Girls tend to arts and crafts, puzzles and board games. Boys want sporting equipment, trading cards and hobby kits.

Where they do come together is in modern technology. Maybe it really is a plot to confound their parents. But their nimble fingers and brains very quickly learn mastery of their gadgets. Initially this tended to be boys playing the games, girls playing the music.

But this has changed too as marketers have grown more savvy in their product developments. Companies like Nintendo Wii have deliberately brought in girl-friendly titles like Just Dancing, Art Academy and Mario Tennis Open. Not a machine gun or jet bomber in sight.

The top three "gender-free" sports are swimming, football and cycling. Educators have widened these choices by deliberately involving boys in cooking and shopping, girls in camping and gardening, so these days they are popular with both.

Renee Weber, of Marketing Store Worldwide, feels the toy industry still has far to go: "The gaps between girls and boys are enormous."

"There's been very little evolution to modify toys to make them interesting to the opposite gender," said Ms. Weber. She said that "there's not a big look at natural play patterns," and that making a toy pink, for instance, isn't going to generate more interest from girls. Colour is not the reason why the genders play differently.

So how do you get girls to play with construction toys? You get them to build things that interest them. Lego has worked at this and earned both praise and smacks for their efforts.

Nearly a year ago they brought out a new range called "Lego Friends" aimed specifically at girls. Still stackable plastic blocks, but with curvy characters called "ladyfigs". The play sets are in purple and yes - pink - with a range of toy girls in charge of beauty shops, horse stables and cafes. Decor includes heart-shaped swimming pools and  and flower pots.

These were not universally welcomed, with critics accusing them of reinforcing stereotypes and focussing on pretty looks.

But the girls do get vehicles - horse boxes - and vets' stethoscopes. There is no sign of male domination in that little Lego universe.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Has Melbourne lost its elegance?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 21, 2012

Ah Spring. The sun is beginning to shine, we start to shed our heavy clothes and move into the best fashion season. Spring is still cool enough that you can wear an outfit mixing several fabrics in a layered style. We've just had the Fashion Festival to remind us that here's the time to check out the wardrobe and smarten up.

But recently, leafing through the photographs of my late mother-in-law, I saw something we don't get so much of any more. Elegance.

The shots are of a trio of beautiful young businesswomen, she and her friends, on a conquest of the City's fashion shops. Then coffee in the famous Paris End of Collins Street where you could imagine you were in a boulevard, surrounded by nineteenth century buildings. This was until architect I.M. Pei and the development barbarians turned it into the Chicago End.

In the 50s, a beautiful woman had to be elegant, too.

Their clothes followed the fashion dictates inspired by the Paris masters like Dior and Chanel. The length of the skirt? The shape of the toe? The rake of the hat? The smart young women ensured that although nature put them two seasons behind Paris and Rome, the garments were ready at the turn of the season.

Since then we have had a Cultural Revolution and such dictates would never be tolerated any more. But while freedom was won, what was lost?

You no longer see elegance among the young women of our city centres. Most seem to wear uniform black or jeans or dreary colourless clothing. But it has been strongly pointed out to me that women choose to dress this way.

Style advisor Pam Abeling of Always in Style has no doubt. "If you're looking for elegance you need to find older women. For young women today it's more about sexy."

The grand fashion and slinky hats wait for the Racing Carnival, then all the finery comes out. But it never makes it to the workday. "You love wearing it to the races, but you wouldn't be seen dead dressed like that for the office," said Pam.

So where did elegance go? It just did not fit with the new liberated times, and got pushed aside.

"I always hated gloves because I'd always lose one," Pam recalled the last attempts by the posh schools to keep their young ladies "elegant". "I was fitted for a girdle at 15, though I was as thin as a rake." And there was one particular hate: "Wearing a hat every day was a pain in the arse!"

So now history spins and we come to the slutty era. The likes of Madonna, Lady Gaga and other pop divas have been accused of thrusting it upon us and last month even Target came under attack for their "slutty" children's range, complained some parents.

But wait there is one ray of light for the faded term "elegance". "You're seeing it used more describing men's fashion," noted Pam.

Elegant men? Well if you flip through GQ magazine or Esquire you'll see handsome male models leaning on Parisian lamp-posts or emerging from the latest Lamborghini, in $3000 suits and silk shirts.

Men are increasingly doing their own fashion shopping - men's retail is growing almost twice as fast as women's - and they have deep pockets if there is something they like.

So perhaps elegance is coming back to Collins Street. Not draped on our liberated girls with their jeans and bare midriffs, but on all those cashed-up traders in their Armani suits and Gucci shoes.

ray@ebeatty.com

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Rowling's wish for magic

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 14, 2012

The higher they climb the harder they fall. So how terrifying to have reached the very peak of success - and then to take another chance.

I don't normally extend a great deal of pity to billionaires, I figure they have their own protection already. But let's spare a moment's thought for J.K. Rowling.

Can Jo Rowling stand up without Harry? Should she care?

Yes she has had vast success both literary - selling half a billion Harry Potter books in 73 languages in ten years - and commercial, from books on Quidditch to eight blockbuster movies that smashed every attendance record. And she has received her share of glory including an OBE, the Legion d'Honneur and the Hans Christian Andersen Award among others.

But what does she do next, five years after Harry's farewell? She wants to write an adult "literary fiction" novel - can she afford to fail?

We will find out on the 27th of this month when The Casual Vacancy will be published world-wide. Will she be acclaimed as a great author after all, or as someone who cannot write above the level of a teenage mind-set? There is a lot of pride riding on this.

From the marketing point of view, international publishing group Hachette have a difficult job. The obvious route is to declare, "At last a new book from J.K. Rowling", blast the news across billboards and TV, and sell millions of copies on the spot. You can see the media buyer's twitching fingers reaching for the keyboard.

But this is not what Jo Rowling wants. The whole launch has been played to a minimum, almost smothered. You'll find a few little placards in bookshops and on the web there is a 120-word synopsis that vaguely talks about events in a quiet English village. Sounds like an episode of Midsomer Murders.

Nevertheless, the publishers have still signed off on a print run of two million, but this is small beer compared to what could be achieved with a little push.

However, marketing has not been totally neglected. For the first time, a Rowling work will be released as an e-book simultaneously. Anyone who has glanced around while strap-hanging on the morning commute will know about the spectacular growth in the use of e-books.

The Pew Research Institute this year showed e-book readership had increased from 17 to 21 per cent of American adults in less than six months. By my observation, we may be growing even faster.

For marketing purposes it gives them the perfect demographic - 34 per cent of these readers are 29 or younger, in other words, the youths who spent their teens lapping up Harry Potter.

So all is ready: the book is written, the warehouses are full, the date is set, we all have to wait for the result - for a book that has been tightly restricted to a few dozen eyes so far.

Her publishing house director, Heather Fain, declared that: "In a lot of ways, we want to think of her as a new author." It's set in the real world, "It's about relationships and how families interact. There is a lot of meat to it," she said.

There are bound to be many reviewers who love it, and many who take the scalpel to it - that's the nature of criticism.

But Ms Rowling should perhaps remember the words of Joseph Heller, author of one of the greatest books of the past century, when he was told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22.

Heller thought, nodded, and then responded: "Who has?"

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com