How a global toy manufacturer profiled a fanbase before the film landed.
A global toy manufacturer held the master toy licence for an animated action franchise with a feature film on the way. A release date creates a hard deadline for range decisions, so it needed to know who the fans actually were well before the film arrived.
A hard deadline set by someone else
Holding a master toy licence for a property with a film in the calendar is a good position and an unforgiving one. Range, packaging and retail conversations all have to be settled long before the release, and a film’s audience is rarely identical to the show’s.
The team needed to know who the existing fanbase was, how it broke down by age and market, and where the property sat against the rest of the category before committing to a line.
Profile the property, then the category around it
The franchise and its fanbase were profiled directly: who names it as a favourite, how that varies by age and gender, and which markets carry the strongest affinity. That gave a defensible picture of the audience the range would be built for.
The same data was then used to ideate across the wider action figures category, identifying where the property could take space rather than only competing with itself. A separate scan looked at an emerging source market to understand the trends and properties beginning to travel out of the region.
A range built on the audience, not the trailer
The team went into range planning with the fanbase quantified rather than assumed, and with a view of category white space to aim at.
The regional trend scan sits alongside it as a pipeline exercise: the same approach applied to properties that have not yet reached the market, so the next licence conversation starts earlier than the competition’s.
A film release tells you when the attention arrives. It does not tell you who is already there. The brands that get this right have the fanbase long before the marketing starts.
Your next range
Know the fanbase before the release date decides for you.
Tell us the property and the window, and we’ll show you the audience behind it.