A game plan for Toys ‘R’ Us Australia
The mothership is going down
Last week, Toys ‘R’ Us announced it’s going bankrupt. I’m trying to get over this blow to my 7 year old self but in the meantime I’ve been thinking about how things could have been different for the store I loved so much as a kid.
The stores in Australia are staying open so this could be an opportunity more than a threat. Not every company gets the chance to be slapped in the face when things are going wrong. And that’s what Toys ‘R’ Us Australia just got. A clear message to drastically change before they get outright obliterated or slip away to never be heard from again.
Where we’re at
Toys ‘R’ Us has been in Australia for over 2 decades. It’s never really made the kind of impact it had in the states during the 1990s. Since arriving it’s amounted over $450m in losses and rarely gotten talked about for doing anything new. No it’s not bankrupt, but it’s not really winning either.
The last big initiative the company ran was a virtual reality Easter egg hunt in 2016. Kids downloaded an app on their parents mobile and scanned pictures of easter eggs located on the store floor to unlock a treat. Sure this isn’t terrible but… it’s nothing magical.
I’ve been thinking about what Toys ‘R’ Us Australia should do now that the mothership has gone bust. Now that they’ve gotten this wake up call, how can they turn this story around and come out on top? And how can they do this while Amazon, the behemoth of e-commerce, enters the Australian market?
Bad habits
Solving the wrong problem
When Toys ‘R’ Us came up with the original idea for their Easter Egg hunt it was probably pretty exciting. Someone likely drove home from work and thought this is going to be really fun. But the team had already made an error. They were solving the wrong problem and they’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem for years. They see low sales as their problem so try to spike them during peak periods. The real problem is that they’re not offering enough value for the people (or mini-people) they want to engage with.
Putting utility over magic
By focusing on sales targets, the team is constrained to do things they know will deliver sales — a common sense objective, but it leads to only doing things that have been done before. And when you’re trying to find a new direction, go places and grow more than ever before you need to take a leap of faith and have the freedom to do something on belief. You need to be able to mix magic and utility to cross the divide from short-term sales spikes to long-term value that benefits you and your customers.
Where to from here?
To really come back from decline, to really lead in the market, Toys ‘R’ Us has to take some big leaps of faith and redefine its value for kids. They have to stop thinking about themselves and go on a deep exploration of what they can bring to the lives of toy-loving kids today. If their next moves don’t slightly scare them, it likely means they’re not pushing hard enough. Here’s what I’d do if I were them:
Framing a new future
Toys ‘R’ Us has always been the place for kids to have real life interactions with characters, stories and toys they love. We shouldn’t lose sight of that. But, we have to acknowledge that we’re still stuck in our hey-dey of the 1990s and the world (and kids) have moved on.
#1 Stop compromising magic for utility
Our role is not to sell toys. When we see that as our role we focus on transactions and we prioritise utility over magic. But that’s a losing game. If we don’t deliver magic our utility is meaningless.
The experience of going to Toys ‘R’ Us is not just about coming to buy things. It’s a place for kids to face bold new challenges, reach great heights and immerse themselves into the world of toys. This has to be more important to us than sales targets. By taking a jump into the realm of magic for kids, we’ll be capturing their hearts and minds. Then hitting sales targets is easy.
#2 We’ve got to get to know kids today.
The mini-humans who are our core customers have changed a lot since we launched two decades ago. Kids growing up today did not know the world before the internet and a 6-month old can navigate with an iPhone better than most people. They have watched movies in 3-D, never needed to use a map, or a house phone and they’re less freaked out by the concept of having a robot do a job. If the world has moved on for them, why hasn’t it for us? Why are our stores almost identical to the one’s I remember from when I was a kid?
To make magic in kids lives, we have to get to know them in their world. We need to seek out what they seek out. Learn what they find amazing, frustrating, exciting and boring. We need to spend lunch breaks playing the latest video games and have staff field trips to visit zoos, theme parks and movies that kids are into. Everyone from the CEO to sales clerks should be there and we should be constantly searching for new ways to get closer to this audience.
By getting closer to kids, we can start to build an edge that Amazon won’t be interested in. Amazon’s focus is on speed and cost for customers. We can focus on real life understanding of kids and building magic into their lives.
#3 Ideas are only as good as the execution
Kids don’t really care about shopping for shopping sake. They want to go places that are fun and exciting. So we can say we don’t “just sell toys” but it only matters if we deliver IRL. Our execution needs to be as bold as our ideas. An an idea is nothing without execution.
There are already others executing on experiences, we can look to them for inspiration. And they aren’t stores — they’re toy makers, museums, concerts, festivals and movie franchises. Barbie’s created real life Dream Houses in Berlin where kids can stay the night and play with all Barbie’s things in life size. Comi-con ran an escape-room style experience for The Westworld TV show. The experience essentially gave visitors an idea of what it would feel like to step inside the television show itself. If we want kids dragging their parents into the store, we need to deliver on bringing magical things like this to life in our stores.
As a rule of thumb, we should be as excited about our execution as we are ideas. We need to push ourselves to be creative and try new things and overcome obstacles, even if it’s hard. We need to focus on targets for the number of jaws dropped, the number of screams and the strength at which mum’s shirt is pulled to go in faaaaaaaassteerr. These are the types of metrics that will help us know we’ve created something worth experiencing. And that’s when we can meaningfully change the needle.
Enlisting the pill sized army
So what would this look like? Let’s take the latest Minion movie. Let’s say the movie was 1 week from release and we partnered with the distributor in Australia to do a store takeover for a weekend.
In the movie, the Minions are on a quest to find their super-villainous leader. When they meet Scarlet Overkill, she tasks her new capsule sized followers to steal Queen Elizabeth’s crown.
To kick off, we’d have the whole team watch all the Minion movies with kids to know how they experience the characters. We’d see which toys they play with afterwards and spend time playing with them to observe how the story comes to life in their imagination.
Then we take these learnings into how we create an experience that’s magical. We come up with the idea to turn the store into an oversized Buckingham Palace built in full minion perspective. We make sure the furniture is extra large and oversized. Door knobs have to be jumped up to to reach. We line the parking lot with Palace guards as kids drive in, huge fluffy hats and all. On arrival at the gate, kids pick roles and characters they want to play. They get one-eyed and two-eyed goggles depending on the minion they’ve chosen to be. They get jean bottoms with suspenders to wear over their clothes. We give them treasure maps that can only be read with the goggles and set them an actual challenge to find the hidden crown somewhere in the store. They have to work together, either by joining other kids already in the store or collaborating with friends to overcome the villains.
Photo booths would allow kids to swap their faces onto minion sized bodies. Once kids capture the crown they can take it home (purchase — there’s your utility) or pickup something from the souvenir-style shop that’s set up at the end of the experience.
And we’d capture their times to find the crown so they can see it on Mum’s phone when they’re driving home. We’d make sure that the store experience was just the beginning and you could keep playing and unlocking new paths to the crown once you’re home.
This is what it looks like to start making magic real. It sounds big, but so will the memories taken away, the word of mouth, and the sharing with friends and followers. It’s about time we got queues outside the door! Nothing’s too big if it means we’ll go from losing to winning.
Added perk: we can share ownership with toymakers
From this style of interaction, we’d not only engage kids but could also partner with toymakers. The store experience would track how kids interact with the characters and toys in real time and this information can help the Minions franchise build out what kind of toys to produce. Why not collaborate? We should be creating new interaction opportunities between well loved toys and their audiences. Instead of just taking orders from sales teams and buying stock, we should co-author the future of the toy world with our makers, suppliers and producers.
Where to begin
It’s always hard to change direction of a ship as large as Toys ‘R’ Us. But there’s already the ambition of giving kids an opportunity to have more interactions with their favourite characters, toys and stories so let’s start there.
Let’s make some bold moves and exciting the team to create more magic. Give the team freedom to create things without having them sales forecast to an inch of their life. If the team has done their homework and is working hard to understand what makes kids tick, it’s worth a shot. Be brave, the worst that will happen is you’ll learn from the mistake. You can learn nothing if you don’t try.
In short:
- Create a culture of meaningful change. Stop asking what’s in it for Toys ‘R’ Us? Instead ask what’s in it for the kids and always look for magic mixed with utility.
- Get closer to the kids. Go to theme parks, watch movies, build forts, play games. Get to know who they are as mini-humans.
- Develop hypotheses on how interactions can deliver magic in real life. Think about in-person and digital experiences, think about everything you see in kids’ lives and turn it into something real. Make their jaws drop through execution.
- Start owning the future of toys with partners. Build two-way relationships that are strategically beneficial, not just financially so.
It’s easy to think the hey-days of Toys ‘R’ Us are gone but I don’t believe it. It’s clear to see the role it can have in kids lives today — even with the likes of Amazon and Netflix. The company just has to believe in a new way forward, find a little magic and take the jump.
