My daughter just sent me the link to this ad for a new line of LEGOs being marketed to girls. She saw it as a retrograde step in attitudes towards women. I have to agree, mainly because of what the new LEGO figurines are portrayed as interested in doing.
It seems like there are many parents who feel that the LEGO company is making a mistake, and they have started a protest petition that says:.
After 4 years of marketing research, LEGO has come to the conclusion that girls want LadyFigs, a pink Barbielicious product line for girls, so 5 year-olds can imagine themselves at the café, lounging at the pool with drinks, brushing their hair in front of a vanity mirror, singing in a club, or shopping with their girlfriends. As LEGO CEO Jorgan Vig Knudstorp puts it, “We want to reach the other 50% of the world’s population.” As representatives of that 50%, we aren’t buying it! Marketers, ad execs, Hollywood and just about everyone else in the media are busy these days insisting that girls are not interested in their products unless they’re pink, cute, or romantic.
This Washington Post article discusses the issue.
It seems to me that it is a simple fact of life that girls are interested in different things to boys. I suppose it is also true that if one girl wants to take an interest in boys things, she gets pressure from both sides to conform. The thing about marketing is that if you get it wrong your product flops and you lose a load of money. If these people really are wickedly enforcing non existent sexual stereotypes they will get their just reward when nobody buys their product.
Stonyground:
Right. Because everyone knows there’s no such thing as actual social pressure.
The thing about marketing is that if you get it right, even products that enforce stereotypes will induce pressure on the consumption of the product.
Funny, LEGO didn’t have to go this route back in the 80s:
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3444/3717671129_64985bd5c6_b.jpg
This is why Stonyground’s contemptible, “it’s not sexist if people buy it” is so stupid and sexist.
I guess I don’t understand why Lego would think that “regular” legos are a “boy” toy. Same thing with tinker toys, Lincoln logs, wooden building blocks, toy cars and trucks, etc. Why do current manufacturers (not to mention parents) think that toys have to be gendered? Some girls and boys like dolls, toy vacuum cleaners, play cook sets, some like building toys, Play-doh, toy guns, toy airports, garages and farms, many like all those toys depending on what mood they are in that day. Why they heck in 2012 for FFS do we insist on shoving kids into pre-labeled boxes. Its worse now that when I was a kid and I am 50! My husband and I made a point of giving our now 17 year old daughter many different toys: dolls, puzzles, Lego sets, doctor kits, toy tool kits, woodworking kits, Barbies. When she was 15 we gave her her own household tool and her own cordless drill. She has been admitted to college and plans to go into Physics with an engineering concentration. She got good grades in Calculus and Science, maybe because no one told her she was supposed to be bad at them. On a separate note I dislike the way boys are discouraged from or made fun of for, wanting to play with “girl” toys, why is it wrong for a boy to play at cooking, taking care of a baby, teaching, etc? And believe me other kids can be cruel to anyone who does something they have been taught is outside the “norm”.
Legos have always been a unisex toy. This isn’t pandering to girls or parents. It’s for grandparents who think they have to buy a gift and no nothing about the grandchild, bar ‘it’s a girl’.
Er… that would be ‘know nothing about the grandchild’
Is it just me or does “LadyFigs” just sound like a bad anatomical euphemism?
This is exactly what I came in here to say. No one seemed to think we needed separate boys and girls LEGO until sometime in the early 1990s, IIRC.
I guess I don’t understand why Lego would think that “regular” legos are a “boy” toy.
Marketing research, I’m sure; that’s what their test subjects think.
I very much doubt that Lego is interested in promoting stereotypes. They’re interesting in selling more product. If making the blocks T-shaped and camoflage colored instead of pink would better market them to girls, they’d be making T-shaped camoflage blocks.
Having said that, IMO Nigel absolutely right: using a stereotype to sell more product has the effect of reinforcing it. So we should still put market pressure on Lego to try and change their advertising campaign, even if they are doing it for “innocent” profitability reasons.
Its worse now that when I was a kid and I am 50!
Well, 1950’s companies probably did not spend anywhere near as much money on advertising research. I’d argue that it isn’t worse because today’s companies are more evil, but because they are more informed about what works and what doesn’t. And, sadly, what works is often sexist.
Since promoting stereotypes would result in selling more product (since little Jenny and little Timmy need a girls’ LEGO kit and a boys’ LEGO kit now), they might perfectly well be interested in promoting stereotypes. They’re interested in it as means to an end and not its own goal, no doubt, but interested in it they are, and they are consciously throwing their voice in with a widespread stereotype.
The saddest thing is that these legos for girls don’t appear to actually involve building anything with legos. From the commercial it appears to offer nothing that Barbie doesn’t offer.
If they thought that pink and lavender would appeal more to girls…
Make pink and lavender blocks.
If they thought stereotypical feminine things would draw in girls, then show them some models of things like castles--princesses have castles, don’t they? Build a suburban house with the dream kitchen (you can do that wit blocks, if you’re clever at all). Let them build the pop star’s “special jet”
And so on.
There were about 5,000 unique ideas they could have come up with under their normal unisex business model of the past that would be smarter than this travesty. They were just too cheap and complacent and moronic to do it.
Funny, for something that “isn’t pandering to girls”, it managed to do that, anyway.
Strange how it so often works out that way.
The concept actually seems pretty cool. I thought LEGO had done it all. They’ve done knights and pirates and race cars. I guess I hadn’t realized that they’ve never done a non-actiony “Town” theme.
On the other hand, I never really thought of LEGOs as being a gendered toy and it feels a little weird that they’re pushing that a lot in this campaign.
“Town” Lego has been around for well over 30 years, it was all I played with as a kid. You can get Lego City Police, Firefighters, Caravans, Garbage Truck. You name it they have it. And it doesn’t have to be any more actiony than any other garbage collection if you don’t want it to.
I’ve seen that picture before and think it’s adorable. The picture also evokes a word that no one has said in any posts here but is clearly on everyone’s mind.
Creativity.
Worse than the insult of everything pink and purple, everything being a toy version of “Clueless” and “Legally Blonde”, is the implication that girls can’t be creative or inventive. “Lego for girls” is pre-designed, pre-set with fixed characters and activities, as bad as Barbie sets.
I’ve had students play with regular Lego and the girls are just as creative as boys, as interested in making the same things -- cars, trees, houses, helicopters, robots, whatever. Letting them be creative encourages them to talk out more and be confident.
The message to girls from this new crap is, “Know your place -- make sandwiches.”
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