Lego Tailors Block Relaunch for Wal-Mart

When Lego updated and repackaged its colorful building blocks in 1995, marketers succeeded in arranging an exclusive agreement with Wal-Mart stores to promote the relaunch with fanfare.Michael O'Leary, creative services manager at Lego Systems Inc., Enfield, Conn., says the company chose a two-part corrugated display created by Jefferson Smurfit Corp., Chicago, to bring the message to the sales floor. The goal was to give the building blocks "a very strong presence in the store in an endcap position," he says. By replacing all the shelving with the one corrugated unit, "it looked like it really belonged there."Composed of 200-pound B-flute corrugated with litho labeling, the 36-inch-wide by 72-inch-high by 14-inch-deep prepack holds 20 SKUs. Side wings reverse fold to secure the products during shipping. Wal-Mart personnel unfold and lock the wings into position, place the top section on the bottom section and add the riser. As a security measure and to ensure stability, the unit attaches to gondolas via twist ties. Die-cut price tabs pop out during folding.The display features Lego yellow to increase attention-getting power. Yellow has grown in popularity in the corporate eye the past few years, says O'Leary, "given the amount of visual noise in most stores." He adds, "Traditional endcaps and power aisles look kind of the same; but yellow sticks out ... and dominates some of those environments."The results came in where we had planned them," says O'Leary. "It sold through in the quantities that we had planned, so it was profitable for us to do."O'Leary says that when Lego was previously seeking supermarket and drugstore business, the company did a lot of display work. "This actually was one of the first jumps we had taken into a floor display and it worked pretty well for us," he notes.He recalls how the display came about: "We had seen some designs that Jefferson Smurfit had done for Disney, and we originally wanted a similar back-to-back display. But then we had the opportunity to get an endcap and endcaps are so precious, we said, 'Let's not try to get an incremental floor spot on one of their power aisles, let's just deal with an endcap.'"Height was their biggest concern," says O'Leary of the Wal-Mart executives. "We knew it had to sit on the gondola base, and they had some concerns about how high it would sit outside of the product area. It couldn't stand too tall because it would actually be out of sight of some of the aisles ... the aisle widths aren't great in some of the stores." In the end, even with a "nice, strong visual on top of the header card, we kept it within their design criteria," he says.

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