The holidays are around the corner: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. We know retailers are getting busy and customers are starting to think about it; the first ‘Halloween’ wave is about to crash in a couple of weeks and the big one, Christmas, is already picking steam:

As a matter of fact, more conversations are taking place on “toys for Christmas” already:

So its time to look at the major toys’ brands (we’ll pick only 3 out of the zillions out there)

– As we measure brand mentions, Lego has an edge because the name of the brand and product are the same which isn’t the case for Hasbro and Mattel (i.e: there is 3x more mentions of Barbie than Mattel in our database)
– The graph above appears to validate this (adweek)
– Less dependent on Christmas

When we look at Lego’s mentions breakdown within eCairn’s 800+ communities , this is what we get:

Same for Hasbro and Mattel:

Moms, Toys and Geek/Personal technology make the bulk of the people who write about Lego.

Noteworthy differences when comparing Lego with brands like Hasbro and Mattel:

• Moms are strong behind the Lego brand.For both Hasbro and Mattel, the Toys community comes first and next is Moms.
• The Geeks and Personal technology communities rank 4,5 and 7 for Lego -> Gadget lovers love Lego and don’t see it as a toy
• Education community is #7 for Lego with 4.34% of the chatter -> Education lovers see Lego as a good education tool

When we look in the Moms community deeper, we get confirmation that tech and education resonates with Lego (measured as a % of the overall conversion in those niche mommy tribes):

Now, lets zoom in 2 different communities to understand what differences exists when those people talk about Lego:

In the moms community, the Lego Friends are the core focus of the chatter:

In the geek community, it’s the themes of movies and comics that come first