Find Christmas Toys

Defining Success with the 4Ps of Branding

By Beth Flom

April 2008

Kids are growing up faster, drastically shrinking the shelf life of toys and challenging manufacturers to create innovative items that capture interest quicker and earlier. Outsourcing and overseas production has instigated a seemingly never-ending public scrutiny of toy safety. And the proliferation of mass-market outlets as dominant retailers has put power in the hands of distributors — often forcing reduced pricing and increased negotiation.

These are just a sampling of the current pressures most toy manufacturers face. And it’s the small and independent companies that feel these pressures the most.

So, where do manufacturers focus energies to ensure success? How does a toy become the safest? Trendiest? Most educational? Cheapest? What strategy and price point will peg consumer interest and ensure retailer buy-in?

LOOKING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

The answer involves looking outward at consumer demand and market pressures and looking inward to the company’s strengths and attributes. Having knowledge in both areas is the key to defining a memorable and lasting brand.

Finding the crossover between market desire and corporate strength may sound simple, but how do you find it? Consider the 4Ps of branding: Promise, Positioning, Personality and Perception. The deliberate blending of these elements during the creation of your brand and the marketing of your products will establish your distinct market presence.

PROMISE

“Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view,” Peter Drucker said. Brand — and marketing in general — must reflect a consistent customer experience.

What do you deliver every time a child plays with your doll or a teen tackles your game? What can parents count on no matter which of your products they purchase for their children? The answer is your brand promise. It’s what keeps buyers coming back.

POSITIONING

“Positioning is not what you do to a product, it is what you do to the mind of the prospect,” according to Jack Trout and Al Ries. “That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.”

It is within the positioning of your product that you identify not only what you do, but who you do it for and how you do it better. To define these elements, get out of your own head and think about it from a consumer perspective. Does the consumer care more that your toys have articulated joints or that they are poseable and playable?

As much as possible, put yourself in the mindset of your customer. Clear positioning provides a long-term plan for company and product growth, so look back on original goals to determine how to move ahead. With a clear focus on the consumer, you should always be able to find the right answer.

PERSONALITY

“You have to reach people on an emotional level. It’s all about feel,” David Aaker said.

Coke and Pepsi sell virtually the same products, as do Apple and IBM, and Barbie and American Girl. Yet each does it differently.

Coke addresses the family, creating warm moments around the fire with Santa Claus. Pepsi takes the new generation and hurls them off cliffs with the comfort of a hang glider overhead. This is where the personality of the product is created. As humans differ in their personalities, so do brands.

Try pairing human attributes with your brand to create an original and consistent feel. Are you competent? Genuine? Fun? Building marketing campaigns and visual representations around a personality creates a strong and memorable emotional impact that stays with the consumer.

PERCEPTION

Flag + Company believes good companies become exceptional by following a simple philosophy: “Know who you are. Tell others before they tell you.”

If you don’t take time to define your company and actively market it, the market will do it for you. Consumers are not short on opinions, and when given the opportunity to share their opinions — particularly in this age of immediate information — they will.

Take the reins before you are forced to counter market perceptions and potential inaccuracies. Proactively establish your brand and promote it in everything from packaging to company voicemails. Consistent representation will dominate perception.

To learn more, please visit: http://www.toydirectory.com/monthly/article.asp?id=3090

About ToyDirectory.com® and TDmonthly™ Magazine
For more than 10 years, ToyDirectory.com has been connecting retailers and manufacturers within the specialty toy industry. It has been ranked by Yahoo! as the most popular business-to-business directory for the toy industry since 1998. TDmonthly Magazine, an online trade publication for the toy, hobby, gift and game industries with more than 27,800 registered retailers, is dedicated to being the most comprehensive monthly resource for the toy industry through trend reporting, reviews, trade show coverage and a 12,000+ searchable database of products in more than 100 categories.

Whether you are bored with the tradition or not?Do you want to have some unique themes for christmas tree?Here are some unique suggestions for christmas tree themes that are sure to be real conversation starters.

The Chocolate and Gold Tree

This is probably the most fashionable of the christmas tree themes described here. It best suitable on the artificial tree. In this case, the color scheme is red,brown.It looks best adding the twinkling light on it. Walnuts, pinecones and chocolates wrapped in foil can be used to decorate this tree. Then tie large transclucent gold and red ribbons, using the kind of ribbon that has bendable wire inside onto the ends of the trees. The ultimate effect of this tree should be very abundant and luxuriant.

The New Baby Tree

This is a great tree to honor how happy you are about the new arrival in your home if you are celebrating the birth of a child or a child's first birthday.You could consider buying a small blue or pink artificial tree even though there are many kinds of trees you can choose. This is a good idea so any toddlers or infants around can't get ahold of any shed needles. You don't have to worry about them yanking lights and pulling the whole thing downif you buy prelit artificial trees. You might want to opt for a small ceramic christmas tree until they are old enough not to grab at decorations and xmas tree limbsIf you have lots of toddlers around .

On pink or blue artificial trees, mint green, lavender and blue frosted glass christmas balls look particularly nice . You can also decorate these trees with baby toys, baby bottles filled with candy, teddy bears, baby booties and socks. Little stuffed animals look great on this type of tree and a larger teddy bear or soft plush toy makes a great tree topper. you might want to consider topping the tree with a doll dressed as an angel if the baby is a girl.

The Sea Side Tree

This most specialchristmases tree themes looks best on artificial trees in aqua or light blue colors. At the same timeit would also suit any tree that has a color such as light orange or pink.As the name mentioned, this tree is decorated with treasures from the sea including seashells, sea horses, and ornaments made from aquarium decorations (treasure chests, coins and corals.) These sea treatures have their different functions in the decoration.Strings of pearls can be used as a garland and novelty lights shaped like seashells or even fish can be strung to enhance the aquatic theme.

The Snow and Ice Tree

As it is white and icy blue instead of the more familiar red and green this is one of the most unusual of christmas tree themes.First decorate it with a garland of novelty lights shaped like icicles or snowflakes. In order to making your tree looks like dripping with frozen, glittering shape your decorations should be made of see through plastic or crystal . instead of cotton battenor cotton shreddings to pretnd tree-branching heavy with snow. You can even mound this cotton at the ends of the bough so it looks like it has been cluster there.

Your final step is to spray the whole thing down generously with flocking. Flocking is snowflake that comes from an aerosol can. You can spray this stuff on any kind of tree including artificial prelit christmas trees and ceramic trees to make them look frostier.

This treatment is not only stunning on a white artificial tree but it also looks great on red, purple, blue or other artificial trees because all of the white provides a nice contrast to the tree's original color.

Wholesale hand painted Christmas ornaments on OrnamentSpace.com.

Christmas is stressful. It doesn't seem to matter how much you are or aren't doing towards the Christmas festivities, stress seems to be everywhere.

Deciding to have a Christmas tree is the tip of the Christmas tree iceberg. Should you go artificial or real? Well, artificial means that you can take it out year in and year out, but are you saving the world? Is it bad to have a real tree and then to dump it after a couple of weeks? Now there is so much awareness about the environment that most Christmas trees come from Christmas tree farms. Here the trees are always replaced, so the woodland is not being lost. Also once it is cut most councils have a recycling facility, so your tree is not just dumped. Hopefully this means that whether you opt for the real or artificial, you will not be doing any harm.

Let say that you have decided to go real. Now you have to work out what sort of tree you are going to get and where you are going to buy it from. Some trees will drop their pines more quickly than others; some trees will smell longer than others. If you have small children it may be best to choose a tree which does not drop too much, firstly you don't want to have them eating the pines or getting stuck in their soft toys. The other problem with pine needles and children is that once the tree is coming to the end of its time and you have really had it with vacuuming cleaning the pines you will get less careful and more of your children's toys will end up in the vacuum cleaner bag!

If you are thinking about the environment, you may want to look for a local farm where the trees are grown. In many of these farms you can actually go and choose your tree and they will cut it down for you there and then. This means that your tree is fresh so the pines should last, it means that the tree has not been sprayed with chemicals to either preserve the pines or enhance the smell, and it also means that it has not been carted around the country via trucking several trucking depots and warehouses before it gets to the outlet where you purchase it from, so your tree would have a smaller carbon footprint.

So now you have the tree, you just have to decorate it. Obviously if you have chosen your tree with care you don't want to hide it in a mist of chemical artificial snow, you will want to respect it! If you really are interested in natural you can look over the history of tree decorations and find many which are natural and you can even make you own. Obviously instead of shop bought chocolates you can have homemade biscuit decorations, but there are also dried fruits and paper decorations which can be just as striking as anything you can buy in the shops.

Christmas is just round the corner and buying and packing of gifts has almost started. Gifts play such an important role during the festive season. A gift list is prepared months before the festival creeps in. A list is made of all the important people in your life be it relatives, friends, colleagues who deserve that extra effort for them. But every year the same problem or confusion pops up which is “What to Buy?”

It is a task to sit and plan the gifts that you want to give out in Christmas. Everyone has their own tastes and needs. Keeping everyone's choices, likes and dislikes into consideration can be quite a task. There are lots of Christmas gifts to be given out this festive season. You list needs to include gifts for the mother, for father, for grandparents, for children, for the spouse, friends and for the colleagues.

For the colleagues at your work place you can buy diaries, pens, corporate baskets or other interesting things for the work desk. For the women in your family you can buy some pretty pieces of jewelery like earing, pendants, flower vases for the drawing room.

Electronics gadgets like the laptop, i-pod, palm top or cell phone are the best gift items that you can present to your brother (whom you must have heard fretting over a cell phone or the latest i-pod) or an absolutely crazy electronic buff sister. You can even make a gift basket which can have an assortment of various items like magazines, CD's cookies, cakes. Decorate the basket with some bright colors to bring in the festive look.

Gifts in the house and how can children be left behind. They rule the gift list, afterall they add all the fun to the Christmas festival. Buying Christmas gifts for kids can be lots of fun. Toys and games of their choices can brought and packed in the glitzy papers. Computer games, dolls, stuffed toys, bikes, board games are just some of the Christmas gift items that can be brought for the children in the family.So, enjoy Christmas by not just spreading love and smiles but by also exchanging gifts and sharing the fun and excitement of opening them.

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Christmas Gifts

Sota Toys has announced that Fall Out Boy has been immortalized in a new action figure set of the band. Working directly with the band, Sota Toys designed these cool dolls based on the band's MTV video hit, "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me'." According to a representative of Sota Toys, Fall Out Boy approached Sota Toys to "make this project happen". It seems to make sense. After all, Fall Out Boy is named after a comic book on the super popular Simpson's cartoon.

At the 2006 Comic Con, the band's bassist Pete Wentz insisted that they were not action figures, but should be called "dolls". Whatever Pete! Aren't dolls soft and cuddley? When Pete Wentz was asked about the production of their Fall Out Boy dolls, Pete responded, "I have one of those faces that's like the basecoat for action figures. I'm what it looks like before you up the paint on. If you put a different hat on me, I look like a different guy. Well, I guess the people at Sota Toys had an easy job when they put together the Pete Wentz Fall Out Boy Dolls!

The 7-inch Fall Out Boy dolls feature vocalist/guitarist Patrick Stump, bassist Peter Wentz, drummer Andrew Hurley, and guitarist Joseph Trohman. They were released out of production in October of 2006 and each doll comes packaged in window box packaging.

Joshua Lundorff is the owner of Rock-n-Roll-Action-Figures.com, an online collectibles shopping site featuring music action figures and toys.

Christmas is a time fun, family and friends and it is the one time out of the whole year that we go crazy on gifts for our entire family and all of our friends. For many of us, we are living on a budget and do not have the money to spend so we max out all of our credit cards and spend the next year paying them off. Although the economy is by no means great and jobs are hard to come by, it is obvious that everyone wants to give their children a wonderful Christmas.

Christmas comes once a year and for a lot of us its probably one of the few times that we have all or most of are family together to enjoy each others company. We watch our children wake up the earliest they have woken up all year long, so they can tear open the presents that Santa left for them. The feelings of happiness and love overwhelm us and no matter how old you are, opening presents is exciting and will never get old. We watch our children with excitement as the open every single present they can find with their names written on the package and when their done they crawl under the tree making sure we have not missed any and sometimes we drift off to when we were their age and felt the way they do at this moment.That feeling alone is one of the best feelings an innocent, pure hearted  child can have and that is why we feel it is our obligation to give them the best Christmas possible.

For all of us who want to enjoy the holidays and have to have Christmas on a budget, now you can, and a good one at that! I have taken the best places and products on the web and put them all together just for you so you don't have to spend hours out of your busy schedule to go to the packed malls or search the web only to find nothing at all what you are looking for. I have spent the last few months researching and finding the best, most trustworthy places as well as great prices for the people that have to have Christmas on a budget but not want to look like it.

It doesn't matter if you are looking for name brand perfumes or electronics you will find it here and with sites like Amazon, you can relax and not worry about feeling like you have been robbed. They have a 100% satisfaction guaranteed moto and if you are not completely happy (which you will be) you can return or exchange it.Come see what all the hype is about and get your shopping done with out hours of waiting in store lines and with out spending your entire savings. Happy Holidays!

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