Building a Community, Part 1

A couple of days ago I mentioned how inspiring my interview with Jake McKee was when I was writing Spark. So, I thought I'd bring you the interview. Here is Part 1 of 2:

I recently changed my title to be more appropriate. I had the word ‘Manager’ in my title, which just didn’t make any sense in a community. The company’s community interaction isn’t about management, because I can’t manage it or control it. I can encourage it, and maybe guide it or add some influence, but I certainly can’t manage community. I don’t think anyone can.

So I am (was) the Global Community Relations Specialist. My responsibility specifically is the company’s relationship to the adult enthusiasts. Some of these people have grown up on LEGO; some have come to it as adults. All of them use LEGO bricks as a creative medium, so instead of doing woodworking or painting, they’re building sculptures and models and all kinds of stuff.

My specific role is to act as a bridge between the company and them, for a number of reasons. Obviously they’re a good group of people to pay attention to, because their average spending per person, per year, is so much higher than the kids’ would be. But, relatively speaking, the numbers are much, much smaller than the overall buying audience of LEGO products.

Connect With Key Voices

In the early days, we got a lot of questions about, ‘If the adults are only maybe five percent of our market, why are we paying attention to them?’ There were a couple of answers to that. Number one, obviously they do spend five percent of the money, which can be the difference between a great year and a bad year. But also, while it may be only a small percentage of adults spending a certain amount, the number of people who they tell about this stuff, and the brand ambassadorship that they carry out to the rest of the world through their public events or just through putting things on their cubicle wall, is pretty significant.

They’re also carrying a really interesting message in a way that we could never, ever carry it. When we say you can build anything with LEGO bricks, the whole consumer base really says, “Sure you’re gonna say that; you’re LEGO – that’s what you do.” But if 10,000 people go out to a LEGO train show, walk through a local mall and see a 30’ by 30’ train layout; every time they stop and say, “Wow, this is great. How long have you worked for LEGO?” and the adults say they don’t, that they just go to the store and buy it, like anyone could – that’s the kind of thing that gets the consumers interested. It’s a pretty powerful message in and of itself.

Establish an Early Warning System

We’ve also learned that these people are our early warning system. There was a lot of questioning up front about whether we should really listen to their feedback – even though they were good, and it was good that they were a market for us – because they’re really not our target audience.

People wondered how much overlap there would be because they had their own sets of issues and interest levels and things that they really liked and didn’t like that were significantly different for kids. And there are certainly times when we look at what they say they like, but what the kids say they hate, and that’s the stuff you filter out. But 60% or more of the time, the adults are saying the same thing as the kids, they’re just saying it six months in advance.

Lately, as we’ve gotten other colleagues interested in working with the adult fans and really believing that the “early warning system” is true, we’ve had a number of different projects where we’ve gone to a small group of the adult fans and said, “We’re interested in having you participate in the product development cycle.” Right now there are three active and ongoing projects with a small group of adult fans as part of the development team for that particular product. It’s pretty amazing.

An example from last year is the LEGO Factory product. It started out as a concept of doing a product line based on the idea of micro-scale buildings. We worked on this internally with our design team, and our designers are brilliant, world-class artists, but we weren’t sure if it was going to actually work. So a guy from our Concepts Department, which is set up to look at product development in the one- to three-year time frame, came to me and said, “We need some input from outside the company but we need it quickly – in like three weeks.” We knew that this kind of time frame would never work with the kids, so when he asked if the adult fans would be interested, I said, “Absolutely.”

Guide the Community

I knew a guy in the community who built this type of micro-scale stuff all the time. I said, “Hey, I’ve got this project going on; I can’t really tell you much about it except it will be really cool. I’d love to have you lead it.” And he said, “That’s great. Let’s do it.” So he found ten of the right people to participate and contacted them on behalf of LEGO Then we decided on the final group together, and he was responsible for moderating the group. These guys were spread all over the U.S. and Europe. Some of them had posted online before but had probably never met. They conducted the whole group online without ever physically sitting down together.

In three weeks, that group generated more content than any of us imagined was possible, just by us saying, “Here’s this concept. What can you build in micro-scale?” We didn’t show them any of our stuff; we didn’t give them any details other than a very short half-page description of the concept. They generated a huge amount of models that they gave to the guy in the Concepts Lab. He was able to make his presentation with all this content and say, “This is a concept worth pursuing, and this isn’t just us. Your worries about whether or not normal consumers are going to believe in this – boom, here’s your answer.”

Having this kind of consumer-driven group gave us the benefit of a hands-off approach. What I didn’t want to do was jump in myself – the moment I enter the room, everybody turns to me and says, “Well, what do we do?” So having a consumer group working through the problems was part of the answer set, as much as the result itself. What they were discussing and the ideas they were driving, what they were all agreeing to, was a part of what was interesting to watch.

Comments

[Sweta-Zinok]

Hi. Sorry for my english. Happy New Year!!!!!
Good Luck!

[Alejo]

I also agree this is a new line of photography. The quoteisn is, can you make any money at it, or is it just a hobby? I have to confess that I have watched a fair number of lego movies on youtube as well. Quite entertaining.

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