WHAT MAKESTOYS SELL

We do not just buy toys. In play, we instinctively rehearse our eternal roles.

We derive the maximum value from narratives that are automatically identifiable and viscerally classifiable as evolving parts of our human experience

What deeply engages us always fulfils some fundamental motive,the evolutionarily-preserved dispositions that have helped us survive and grow

Concepts are neural structures that allow us to order and categoriseall stimuli around us

Our psyche consists of a code. We are an ordered pattern of fundamental motives capable of generating life.

Successful brands coherently express the very patterns of our psyche

Using , for the first time, a multidisciplinary

approach, including brand communication

decoding, motivational research, psychology,

affective neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, cultural

anthropology, sociology, philosophy and their

proprietary tools, BRAND AVIATORS™ has studied

the motives underpinning buying behaviour in over

70 global categories of goods including toys

Beneath all the phantasmagoria of global

marketing communication, lies order and

rhythm, the source code of our human

behaviour

What follows is a brief analysis of the deep motives for buying toys. The motives are presented in order of increasing relative importance in line with their power to influence our buying decisions. The further we read, the stronger the associations they build in our mind, the more powerful their influence on the sales and profit in the toys category.*

* A book will shortly be published, extensively analysing the

motives underpinning 33 categories of everyday consumer

goods and our fundamental human motives. It puts forward the most integrated platform for engaging people to date.

CONTROL: On an initial layer of motivation,

toys give us the opportunity to exert a

greater control over our environment, and

even momentarily to be authors of our

destiny. Toys frame the owner as an

individual. Acting as objects and subjects at

the same time, they condition our behaviour

through the meaning and values that are

imbued in them.

DISRUPTION: More significantly, we buy toys because they help us defy negative and too powerful forces inside and outside us and create our survival space. In essence, play is a psychic exercise which prepares us to welcome life’s happiness and sadness, triumphs and defeats.

Toys help us step outside

normal life, bend rules, break

normal patterns. Toys overturn

the normal order of values.

CARE: Inherently small and

helpless, dolls, teddy bears and

other babies and fragile

creatures, need our loving care

to survive, effectively arousing

our care giving instincts. Our

mind is shaped in such a way

that the more one seems to

need us, the more we love

him/her.

COMPANIONSHIP: On a deeper

level, toys are the relational items

par excellence. Toys are always

available and provide their love

freely and unconditionally. Toys help

us connect with others and they

become themselves our real

companions.

INTELLIGENCE: Toys have the capacity to

feed the mind and make us more well-

rounded. They prompt human thought,

they educate us they make us smarter.

Toys as the artifacts of play help us to

unify our personality, they give us a

sense of balance in life. As Schiller and

many other thinkers believed, we are

only wholly humans when we are

playing.

ACHIEVEMENT: Toys are tools of

development and a means of self-assertion.

As toys are agents capable of having an

effect and as we get great pleasure in

anything we can do effectively, we like to

think that toys promote the greatest growth

in every living person.

CREATIVITY: Toys help us create and

express our individuality. In play

children use all their being, from

instincts to acts, feelings and

thoughts. As all their personality is

expressed they, ultimately, create

a world infinitely richer and more

complete than reality exemplified

through the strikingly common

wellspring of similarities in

concepts of masterpieces and

children’s fantasy play.

REASSURANCE: Moving closer to the

dominant motives, toys make us feel

safe and happy. Toys represent a

source of comfort – something to turn

to. They are small, cosy, placid, totally

predictable and thus they easily

become vehicles of affection and

consolation. With them children keep

reality at bay and take the space to

grow at their own pace.

EXPERIMENTATION: Toys help us seek

everything that is interesting in existence.

Play is anticipation, expectation, arousal,

excitement, stimulation, arbitrariness,

incompleteness, thrill, risk, curiosity,

search, novelty of experience, an attempt

to diversify. They are exploratory items

that help us satisfy our instinct to “try-out”

life. They trigger vital experiments that

open doors out onto the limitless world.

TRANSFORMATION: One of the deepest motives

for buying toys is their transitory nature, their

very capacity to be vehicles for the imagination.

Play extends the settings and expands the

present. As is the case in every ritual, in play

there is always transition. Play is a metaphoric

action, a suspension of disbelief, which involves

a transformation of the physical world. It is a

threshold, a passageway to alternative worlds.

Children and adults alike, eliminate reality to

see what cannot exist for the time being. Toys

play the role of the mediators in the transition

and encourage pretend and make-believe play.

JUBILANCE: On the deepest layer of human

motivation, toys help us express our

exuberant nature, our very motive to exalt

life. Play is autotelic, the end in and for itself.

Successful toys enable us to take possession

of the wholeness of life. Capturing the

intimacy of the moment, they introduce us to

the ecstatic play of the world. Toys have the

ability to create frenzy, intensive pleasure,

euphoria, exhilaration, exultant joy, gaiety,

gladness, and laughter that absorbs us

completely, intensively, and tumultuously.

This map

illustrates the

way some major

brands of toys

are positioned in

the consumers’

mind

Deep category understanding is just the first step in creating engaging narratives. To build a proposition that is deeply engaging, the brand must germinate the bare motives that drive the category in a unique and profoundly human way.

Having captured, for the first time, our fundamental human motives at the deepest levels of their deployment, all the way from their biological value to the neurosystems they engage in our brain, to the cognitive operations and psychological states they activate, to the major social reinforcers they cause and to the rich hierarchy of inherent concepts they infuse into our everyday life, BRAND AVIATORS™ helps marketers develop Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™

Based on in-depth research and practical implementation, BRAND AVIATORS™ helps marketers develop brands with a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in the fundamental human motives, using a three-phase methodology

Phase 1: Map the territory

The first phase of the methodology deconstructs the fundamental human motives driving the sales and profit of the category, establishes the relevant psychographic territories and reveals the way that the brands are mapped in people’s mind

Phase 2: Give soul to your

brand

To be authentic and engaging, narratives must always be sourced from the core of the brand. The second phase captures the core of the brand, and mobilises its genuine codes in order to satisfy our common motivations relative to the category.

Phase 3: Enrich people’s lives

Powerful strategies require effective articulation. In this third phase, the consumer proposition is translated into ownable experiences written in the language that uses our primary emotions as structural elements.

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There is a direct correlation between

our fundamental human motives and

the level of sales and profit

Nothing fuels creativity more than understanding andmobilising our fundamental motives and the rich hierarchy of inherent concepts they infuse into our everyday life

The efficiency of communication budgets is maximised when the authentic codes of the brand match the deepest motives which drive sales and profit in the category. Nowadays, we have no excuse for saying that “we waste half of our advertising budget but we don’t know which half”.

Above all, by founding brand strategy on our fundamental human motives, and by embedding Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™ the brand becomes deeply humanistic in that it offers holistic, universal experiences that no longer simply satisfy some individual needs but the needs of the species

Ask here for your FREE eBOOK “The Intrinsically Engaging

Narratives™ Of Toys” to boost the sales and profit of your brand:

http://www.brandaviators.com/ask-for-your-free-ebook