Marketing Strategies

Let’s wrap up the rest of the weekend news…

Some of the Justify items are now available; I’ll be getting the Traditional version eventually, because of my recent infatuation with the Carrick mold. It’ll be a while though, because: he’s already on backorder on the web site; it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be any where near one of my local toy stores for the next few weeks; and good heavens, have you seen those prices on eBay?  

I can wait.

The Unicorn Foals Sirius and Vega are neat – and on my two favorite Classic Foal molds! – but as I’ve skipped most of the other recent Unicorn releases, I’ll probably skip them too. Kudos to Reeves for coloring them to match their astronomical counterparts.

(Vega is the blue one.)

Renewals for the Vintage Club are up, but so far all they’ve been offering is a picture of the Pacer Rockford, who we already knew about.

I have no clue what their marketing strategy is, and am assuming that pictures of the other models will be coming eventually – perhaps as a way of gauging the response to each release? Because I severely doubt that they’re going back to the “everything’s a secret” mode from the first year of the Vintage Club. Especially since, you know…

(Is it ironic that the suspense is killing me?)

Regarding those YouTube videos that Reeves taunted us with – specifically, the one with the mysterious Solid Bay Bristol in it – well, I found them more annoying than rage-inducing. If you’re going to click-bait hobbyists who’d normally never give a passing glance at these videos, could you give us a little something for our effort?

I’m not much of a YouTube person, I’m not the target audience for these types of videos anyway, and I’m okay with that: hobbyists and hobbyist organizations certainly aren’t doing much in the way of youth outreach, and it’s in Reeves’s financial interest to do so.

But offering exclusive information about possible upcoming releases via these kinds of channels does not seem quite right, either. It’s like giving out sports scores during a weather report, or stock market tips in the middle of some celebrity gossip: while it is technically all news, it is not the news the viewers are looking for, or where they were looking for it.

My only other real criticism is that I’d rather they take more of a “bottom-up” approach than a “top-down” one with their youth marketing. Focus on activities and crafts that are more affordable and accessible to everyone: battle bots made with $150 Web Specials and craft bowls made with $50-75 worth of Stablemates would not have happened in the working-class household I grew up in.