General Marvel Legends

You'll have to excuse me while I go over here and not believe that kids under 12 are not only buying Marvel Legends figures en masse, but are buying MORE of them than adult collectors. Show me the data, Jesse.
Or is this just 'girl toys don't sell?' Bullshit industry 'common knowledge' with absolutely no evidence or data behind it, that everyone believes because some stupid dickhead that's been in the business for 30 years said so and everyone just believed them because they were white and male and said it with a sense of authority?
 
I wonder if there's something to target demographic and the verbiage of the license. I can't imagine a ton of kids were shelling out $450 for Galactus.
 
Resilient said:
I can't imagine a ton of kids were shelling out $450 for Galactus.
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He explicitly cited Dragon Man wasn't an example of something kids are buying. He said it was the figures that make it to mass retail that ends up being the bulk of their Legends sales, and went on to clarify that in recent years they've made a point of having the A-list characters on the shelves for at least 8 months per year that end up being their best sellers.

I definitely get the skepticism; that's the reason I posted the video here. But I also don't get how any of us can just discount what he said out of hand particularly in a way that ignores some or all of the detail he went into. I only briefly summarized what he said, but in the video he went into 30 to 60 seconds of detail about who Legends sell to.
 
NORM said:
Not that my experience is universal, but I imagine the A-list characters they say are in the stores are the MCU reissues of Cap and Iron Man and Spider-Man that seem to eternally warm pegs from the moment they’re hung.
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Using a recent example I would think it's more like the Gamerverse wave of Spidey variants that sold out in every Target in my area.
 
Gamerverse Spidey definitely got folks out, I ran into a guy that I would have pegged as a Hotwheels guy looking for Symbiote Spidey. Presumably the youths are buying them as well. I could absolutely see evergreen MCU Cap and Spidey being on shelves for 8 months accounting for an ass-ton more units than comic Banshee and Adam Warlock. The point is that they are perpetually stocked and it gives the non-frequent buyer (grandparents and parents) an opportunity to find a good Spidey as a present. The ratio of grandparents:collectors out there is insanely disproportionate so even a small percentage of occasional purchases by them would beat collectors by volume.

All that said, no one grandparent is outspending a collector or going as deep. They get money out of us by releasing dozens of different figures we'd buy, which makes it look like we buy more.
 
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I think if it was mainly adult collectors buying Legends, then they would have been relegated to the NECA/Funko section of Target years ago and not taking up valuable main toy aisle real estate. I am sure it is a mix for the main releases, and I still think we underestimate the "grandson, nephew, neighbor's kid birthday party" sales where someone picks up a random Wolvie or Spidey or Cap.

Now, how they measure this would be interesting as they either need to be doing surveys or they could be data mining the Target and Walmart and Amazon data to see what else is being bought by the same credit card/account. In that case they may be making an assumption that if that card is buying children's clothing, juice boxes and back to school items that the "toy" purchases are for the kids as well, compared to say an adult who never buys that stuff. It could be that the majority of sales are to households with children under 12.
 
Chooch555 said:
All that said, no one grandparent is outspending a collector or going as deep. They get money out of us by releasing dozens of different figures we'd buy, which makes it look like we buy more.
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Adding to that, the majority of unique customers may be families/kids buying a few figures a year, but the majority of dollars could be coming collectors buying 50+ figures a year.
 
Legends waves are barely even on shelves anymore so I could easily believe most of the legends sold in the last year around here were just random kid pickups of those repacked MCU Caps, Spideys, and Iron Mans. There’s not much variety to them but they get restocked a lot more than you’d probably think and they’re in virtually every store.
 
fac said:
I think if it was mainly adult collectors buying Legends, then they would have been relegated to the NECA/Funko section of Target years ago and not taking up valuable main toy aisle real estate. I am sure it is a mix for the main releases, and I still think we underestimate the "grandson, nephew, neighbor's kid birthday party" sales where someone picks up a random Wolvie or Spidey or Cap.

Now, how they measure this would be interesting as they either need to be doing surveys or they could be data mining the Target and Walmart and Amazon data to see what else is being bought by the same credit card/account. In that case they may be making an assumption that if that card is buying children's clothing, juice boxes and back to school items that the "toy" purchases are for the kids as well, compared to say an adult who never buys that stuff. It could be that the majority of sales are to households with children under 12.
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I think they get into the toy aisle because it’s Hasbro, not because they’re for kids. If they did track sales based on credit card purchases they would attract a ton of noise. My credit cards buy toys and kid stuff and cat stuff. I guess if Jesse comes back to claim cats are buying a large proportion of Legends then we’ll know how they’re doing things.
 
Data mining can be very sophisticated when you have millions of transactions for millions of customers, especially if you can match subset or sample of accounts where you do know details about those customers so you can confirm some assumptions.

I'm going to believe Hasbro has a better capacity for measuring and understanding their market than we do, and Target knows what products it wants to shelve next to each other to make sure that the customers they want to see it can see it. There's a reason the NECA/Funko stuff is usually on the back wall near the electronics, those are low traffic areas and they know the customers most interested in those items will make the effort to get there (adult collectors and teens, and for the content of some of the figures not being kid friendly). If Target thought the only people buying Legends were the same folks buying the collectibles, they would move them there in a heartbeat and try to find a more child/mom friendly toy line to put in its place - that toy aisle space is valuable and knowing who peruses that aisle is intertwined.
 
fac said:
There's a reason the NECA/Funko stuff is usually on the back wall near the electronics, those are low traffic areas and they know the customers most interested in those items will make the effort to get there (adult collectors and teens, and for the content of some of the figures not being kid friendly). If Target thought the only people buying Legends were the same folks buying the collectibles, they would move them there in a heartbeat and try to find a more child/mom friendly toy line to put in its place - that toy aisle space is valuable and knowing who peruses that aisle is intertwined.
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Something to keep in mind that we've said in these and the previous forums and that I've heard McFarlane say several times in interviews is that toy companies pay Target and Walmart for that shelf space. My guess has long been that the toys over by electronics are from companies that don't pay for shelf space, but that could easily be wrong. So it's not just that Target is selling more items in the main toy aisles--they're also earning money by renting that space out to toy manufacturers.

But this might be irrelevant to what we're talking about. Whether it's Target deciding who to rent shelf space to or the toy manufacturers deciding that renting that shelf space is to their advantage because most toys sell well there either way toys are selling.

Who they're selling to is tough to say. I still don't get it--any kid under 12 would mostly get pushed towards the basic toys, not Legends, once they ask their parent to buy particularly since all of the retail stores put both of those lines near each other on the shelves. So certainly it's difficult to believe that it's kids under 12 mostly buying Legends.
 
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fac said:
I think if it was mainly adult collectors buying Legends, then they would have been relegated to the NECA/Funko section of Target years ago and not taking up valuable main toy aisle real estate. I am sure it is a mix for the main releases, and I still think we underestimate the "grandson, nephew, neighbor's kid birthday party" sales where someone picks up a random Wolvie or Spidey or Cap.
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It wasn't that long ago that news sites were running entire articles about how adults are the ones buying the toys now. Just because it's in the toy aisles doesn't mean anything. Locally, all of Jada's Street Fighter figures are in the regular toy aisles, and I don't believe for a second those are being sold to more kids than adults.

I think we have to bear in mind the difference between 'made for kids' and 'sells primarily for kids.' Most action figures you find in stores are still made for kids. They pass safety standards for kids. They are made to be toys that can be played with by kids. Doesn't mean kids are the ones actually buying them.
Joe Classified is sold in the toy aisles and carries all the usual suspects of safety testing for kids 12+, I believe. But like.. are we really going to debate whether or not G.I. Joe is currently selling better to kids or to adults?

I DO think Marvel Legends still sells tremendous amounts of product to kids. 1000%. Kids still want a Spider-Man figure, or a Wolverine figure. What I don't think I can believe without actual supporting evidence is that those single sales (because, let's face it, that's what those are - individual sales) are beating out the collectors coming in and wiping out an entire case assortment in a single purchase, collectors ordering entire waves at a time, buying multiples of army builders, etc. I also think it might actually be ludicrous to assume half of the characters in some of these assortments appeal to kids AT ALL. Black Suit Spidey? Absolutely. Cap? Definitely. Adam Warlock? Come on. If that figure sold even half as well as Spidey, then that proves kids aren't buying more figures than adults, because adults bought all the Adams, AND probably 2/3 of the Spideys.


fac said:
If Target thought the only people buying Legends were the same folks buying the collectibles
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No one said 'only.' It's about percentages. If 49% of sales are kids, and 51% are adults, that's still a LOT of kids buying Legends, but adults would still be the majority.
One could also argue that the existence of things like the Made-to-Order products and the HasLabs proves that even Hasbro doesn't really view this as a line that mostly appeals to kids, or they wouldn't bother with stuff like this and they'd make things more kid-friendly and wallet-friendly to stick into Walmart.

fac said:
and Target knows what products it wants to shelve next to each other to make sure that the customers they want to see it can see it.
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Sort've. I knew a buyer for Target some years back. He was not well-informed about what certain products even were, just general sales numbers. And, granted this was maybe 8 years ago that we last spoke, the data was extremely non-specific. It was literally just sales per day, per week, per month, per year, with a little bit of ancillary data. He once made a joke to me that you sell cat food assuming cat-owners are buying it, but you actually have no idea. You just carry it because SOMEONE keeps buying it.

To use your Funko example; lots of kids actually own Funko. BOTH of my kids had POP figures despite my protests (I fucking hate those things and I hate that anyone gives that company money). Both of my kids STILL own a few, in fact. So I don't even think POP is necessarily left out of the toy aisles for demographic reasons. In fact, in my local Walmarts, the POP section was near the board games in the toy aisles for years and years. Still might be, I honestly can't remember if they moved them.

So the reasoning Funko is in Electronics, to my understanding from someone I know in the 'bidniz' is because Target (and other companies) more closely associate Funko with people that collect based on entertainment brands rather than play value. So if you love Gilmore Girls DVDs, they want to have the stupid Gilmore Girls dead-eyed creepy nerd hummel nearby, where you will see it. Funko appeals to that idea by having a massive spread of licenses, MANY of which are based on all kinds of movies and TV shows. So yeah.. Funko POPs are more of an 'entertainment collectible' than a 'toy.' And therefore Target does not put them with toys.
As I said.. Walmart does. At least here. So it's just a matter of perspective.
 
EnigmaticClarity said:
My guess has long been that the toys over by electronics are from companies that don't pay for shelf space, but that could easily be wrong.
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Could be, but I suspect it is also partly the properties those figures represent. Presumably the number of 10 year olds (and their Moms) wanting Game of Thrones and The Office Funkos and NECA Jason figures is low, and Target has no desire to have some Mom be upset their 6 year old that little Timmy picked up an Art the Clown figure next to Luke Skywalker. So put them in a corner.

EnigmaticClarity said:
I still don't get it--any kid under 12 would mostly get pushed towards the basic toys, not Legends, once they ask their parent to buy particularly since all of the retail stores put both of those lines near each other on the shelves. So certainly it's difficult to believe that it's kids under 12 mostly buying Legends.
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I don't think it is 12 year olds buying themselves that often (although decades ago I often used any birthday money as a kid to buy the more expensive toys my parents wouldn't buy for me), but adults buying it for them. As noted, my suspicion is that alot of this depends on how he was defining majority - majority of unique buyers are for 12 and under, majority of purchases are in homes with a child 12 and under, majority of sales in dollars. I can see if defined as the first two its possible, less sure if it dollars.

One last thing - if we assume that the adult collectors are the baseline that more or less supports the "floor" of sales (regardless of the character name), it could be that children engagement represents the ceiling - so any Legend will sell say 25,000 units from the core customer base, but the only way they sell say 100,000 units or more is for a movie Spidey or Iron Man because kids are the additional customer...that potential skewing of the sales curve for the hottest characters could make the kids the key for a figure doing OK and being a hit.
 
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