chuckdawg1999 wrote:Chris McFeely had a good point. The toys are designed for kids because they have to be, there's no way they'd be sold at brick-and-mortar retail otherwise. The character choices are for adults, that just makes sense.
This round table interview confirms that it's not the case. Marvel Legends skew older and yet are sold in the kids toy aisles. Transformers definitely seems to be different than other action figure brands on multiple levels.
AcademyofDrX wrote:I've been very consistent with my pushback: "primarily kids" doesn't mean "not for adults," it means kids plus adults, ostensibly in that order. "They are currently undergoing market research to see the percentage of sales from different demographics." That tells me that Hasbro themselves don't have a good handle on it.
What I personally found more interesting is that Marvel and Hasbro skew older than TF, as reported by Ben Yee on the topic of closed boxes. I've always considered Generations to be the product class equivalent to Legends and Black Series, though only those two are uniformly in closed boxes. So at least implicitly, it seems like Hasbro is acknowledging those are more collector-oriented.
I don't have a bone in the fight, since it comes out to the same for me, I buy new toys
But as someone interested in the brand way too much, I like having my facts right and as it turns out, the target audience becomes the backbone to answering all pour other questions like: packaging, alt mode selection, character selection, price points, budget, market, plastic used, distribution and on and on.
So while it is good to have a quotable and direct answer right now, I was ready for any answer, I just wanted the truth. We knew what the answer was 5 years ago, but I wanted to know if it was still the same because Hasbro kept bringing up the word "fan" and such. As it turns out, a fan in the transformers line is 8+.
And it also helped me see something I (and Scott the toy guru) was wrong about. I wrongly assumed that since deluxes and marvel legends and black series were the same price point (though black series is PUSHING IT WAY PAST THAT HOLY HELL ARE THEY BECOMING RIDICULOUSLY PRICEY!!!) that they thus appealed to the exact same market and thus were designed with the same market in mind. I mean, it makes sense, logically, but it's wrong.
Also, important point to make, all we know here is this:
The proportion of sales in the Transformers Generations line for kids outweighs that for adults while the proportion of sales in the Marvel and Star Wars lines have a heavier weight of sales towards adults COMPARED to the TF line.
So that means that we still don't know if adults are the main people that end up with marvel legends of Black series (I'd assume so, given what was said but it wasn't made explicit)
And, very importantly, it does not mean that there are more adults collecting Black Series or marvel Legends compared to the amount of adults buying Transformers. The reason why that's important is because it could be that in terms of numbers, there are as much sales coming from adults in all lines, it just so happens that kids are also heavily involved with the sales numbers for Transformers. So, the importance of pleasing fans in the marvel legends line and black series line could be as important for the Transformers line.
Does that make sense?
That would explain Hasbro's big push in investor meetings for the Trasformers brand(also, they own the IP, so a big win for them if that's the case).
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