How a global toy manufacturer spotted the next big IP before the market agreed.
One of the world’s largest toy manufacturers needed a consistent global view of kids’ lives to plan content, product and marketing years ahead. Fast-moving trends, emerging properties and fragmented regional data made early validation difficult, especially in its growth markets.
Global planning on fragmented data
Long-term content, product and marketing decisions were being made against research that moved slower than the audience did. Trends shifted, new properties emerged, and by the time a regional study confirmed a signal the window to act on it had usually closed.
The bigger problem was comparability. Different markets meant different sources, different questions and different fieldwork dates, so a global view had to be assembled rather than read. Growth markets were the least well served of all.
Horizon scanning on one comparable read
The manufacturer moved to a single continuous dataset covering 16 markets, asking the same questions of kids, parents and young adults on the same cadence. Emerging properties could be tracked as they climbed rather than confirmed after the fact.
Two deeper pieces of work sat on top of that. The fandom of a global collectible franchise was analysed in detail to support audience segmentation and a premium launch strategy. Separately, the team tracked a major rival’s entry into its own core category, benchmarking awareness from the moment the competitor arrived.
Earlier validation, fewer expensive guesses
Emerging properties and trends could be validated before major investment decisions, strengthening horizon scanning at the stage where it is cheapest to change your mind.
The fandom work gave marketing sharper segmentation and stronger storytelling for launch. And the competitive tracking meant the rival’s category entry was read in real time rather than reconstructed from sales data months later.
Most businesses can tell you which properties are big. Far fewer can tell you which ones are becoming big. That difference is why one company pays a premium for a licence and another the price.
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