ZURU Pet’s Alive Collection
MARKETING LAUNCH STRATEGY
This past winter (Winter 2020), I had the opportunity to extern for ZURU. My team members Cody, Miriam, and I created a new toy Chickie and built marketing strategy recommendations (with consideration of Covid-19) to best launch our product. We were one of the three finalists for our case study.
ABOUT ZURU & PET’S ALIVE
ZURU is a disruptive and award winning toy company based and founded in New Zealand that designs, manufactures and markets innovative toys and consumer products. ZURU is a fast growing company: with its unique innovation, creativity and “fun” at its core, ZURU helps kids reimagine playtime through its many toy brands, some of which you can see above.
The Pet’s Alive series is one of ZURU’s most iconic and popular toy lines of both 2019 and 2020. It currently consists of 8 hilarious dancing pets. From a Flossing Sloth to a Booti Shaking Llama and Magical Unicorn, each character exudes a unique DANCE trait that brings the product line to life. The Pet’s Alive is the sister line to ZURU's ROBO Toy line which caters towards a male audience.
IDENTIFYING OUR TARGET AUDIENCE
The Pet’s Alive series target young girls ages 3-6 years old, given the brand’s choice of using pink, purple, and sparkles in the product line. We believe it is important to fully understand our audience to design the most effective marketing strategies and product. Thus, we also examined the psychology, consumer preferences, and media behavior of our users.
First, we looked into psychology to help with our toy design, functionality, and branding. We discovered that kids in this age group are still developing their gross motor skills, including things like walking, jumping, kicking and hand-eye coordination. By incorporating the dancing aspect into our doll, children can strengthen their (dance) mobility and stay physically active, which is important for their health.
Next, we noticed that color plays a large role in influencing a child’s preference. In a Psychology Today article, younger toddlers prefer bright hue colors such as blue, red and pink. They also enjoy things that are huggable and embrace a warm and happy vibe, such as cute animals, plush, and doll toys.
Finally, we found that children are easily influenced by their peers and parents, and are more susceptible to do things from their orders. In addition, TV is the most popular channel for children to get news from. These information helped us understand our audience better to strategically position ourselves and our product to launch successfully.
THE REVEAL
Introducing... Chickie the Explorer!
She’s a fluffy 15 inch doll, making her the perfect size to hug, carry, and take out on car rides. She dances with the push of a beak, and comes with a QR code for children to register their doll in the online game. Not only will her engaging dance moves keep kids on their toes, her educational abilities will help children develop their English level at a young age. If that still isn’t convincing enough, every chick will also come in it’s own soft Egg home that is collectible and unique to the color of the chick.
Here are the three unique colors and egg homes that Chickie will be available in. We seek to attract young girls of different personalities, whether they're girly girls, appreciate bright colors, or more reserved in nature. They can purchase them to match with friends, or collect them all!
We will be pricing each soft Egg home and Chickie set at $18.99. This price is consistent with those of the other pets in the Pet’s Alive collection. It will cover all costs of producing the egg shell and chick, as well as the online educational game feature, while still being affordable and attractive to our customers.
OUR STORY
We designed Chickie with the goal of manifesting the youth, beauty, and innocence that each little girl naturally possesses. The traits that this baby chick embodies will allow young girls to love and nurture something similar to themselves. They can let loose and dance with Chickie, who will guide them to become more active and confident. At the same time, we seek to provide children with educational support during a time where their motor and logical thinking skills are developing.
We want to be the impact that shapes beautiful young girls into tomorrow’s future.
INCORPORATING EDUCATIONAL GAMES
An example of an educational game that we will be offering includes the Pink Alphabet Road. The goal of this game is to guide children to associate objects with the correct spelling of the vocabulary. They receive a badge upon successfully helping Chickie cross the pink A - Z road. We plan to launch multiple other themes like Butterfly Garden and Floral Bloom Path to help grow children’s vocabulary level in an engaging way.
SWOT ANALYSIS
While the Pet’s Alive series is a very new line and attracts mainly a female audience, the series had a whopping one year toy growth of 1600% from the launch of just 2 successful toys. This means lots of hope and potential for an upward trend for the Pet’s Alive series and our product.
For strengths, our new product will create potential buzz and traction around this product line. Additionally, Chickie encourages consumers to be active through her keen dancing moves and quality robotic manufacturing, has a great price value, is soft and transportable, and provides educational initiatives to help children gain the knowledge they need. We believe this can create a great growth opportunity for ZURU, as we hope to connect their tech segment with the toy segment, and open a new market in education. Since ZURU is already a fast-growing company, our product can make ZURU even more competitive in the toy industry by increasing the company presence both online and in stores. For threats, since the toy industry is currently very competitive, it’s important to take note of our competitors and understand the industry climate.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
Here are our main competitors. Each of these competitors have “interactive pet” toys with similar concepts to each other.
Our biggest competitor is Hatchimals produced by SpinMaster, as both of our toys have a soft-chick and egg concept. However, our product is much more affordable at 18.99 for consumers, compared to Hatchimals which costs 60.99. Ours also require much less maintenance, as Hatchimals owners need to constantly care for and hatch each egg. Another plus is that our product includes two cool dance features and a series of educational learning games, which Hatchimals and the rest of the competitor companies do not offer.
LAUNCH & MARKETING STRATEGY
We have two main strategies that we hope to execute — Organic Content through social media and Paid Ad Media.
In Organic Content, we will be utilizing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter to expose Chickie to a large audience during the pre-launch and post launch phases. Since most 3-6 year old children may not own social media, this strategy is aimed to capture the attention of parents and incentivize them to purchase Chickie for their young loved ones. Here are mockups of the ad content we hope to use during launch.
Our second strategy is paid ad media strategically placed in Amazon and Parenting PR sites to promote Chickie. According to Statista, in 2019 over 150.6 Million Americans shopped on Amazon, making it the most popular E-commerce website in the US.
Finally, the last paid media ad strategy we will use is television, which we selected to serve as our main and recommended marketing channel. We plan to create 10 second commercial ads that will captivate and DIRECTLY inform consumers, since toddlers have very short attention spans. This will be a great way to also show a “live demonstration” of our product ‘Dancing” in action, since many retail stores aren’t allowing people to come in and test it themselves LIVE. In executing our promotional TV ad campaigns, we aim to streamline it through three channels: PBS Kids 24/7 Network, Nick/Nick Jr, and YouTube.
KPI
These are the key performance indicators we will be using to measure the success of our strategies.
1) Media reach and impressions
2) Dollars in sales generated from the total number of product sales
3) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
LAUNCH RECOMMENDATION
These are our proposed launch dates.
We suggest launching during March and April so Chickie and its egg can fit nicely into the theme of the Easter celebration. Otherwise, launching during the Holiday and Christmas season may create a “high toy craze” and attract consumers to purchase our product as gifts.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS
We plan to distribute Chickie through both physical and online retailers. We suggest first releasing Chickie on online retailers such as Amazon, Target, Walmart.com and the ZURU website, given the COVID-19 pandemic and stay home order. Should conditions improve, we would like to expand toward brick and mortar retail stores to increase product visibility.
BUDGET OVERVIEW - MARKETING & MEDIA STRATEGY
With our 50K dollars, we spent the majority of our budget on TV advertising and commercial production since it was a main channel to target our consumers. We spent $5K on Paid Amazon Ads due to the high consumer traffic Amazon receives each month; we believe this is a good way for our product to get recognized. Lastly, we also invested into social media and other paid media ads such as email, website, and parent blog marketing to maximize channel visibility.
THANK YOU.
I hope that Chickie the Eggsplorer EGGcited you! As a toy that comes in three different color styles, can moonwalk and chicken dance and educate children with learning games, what is there not to love? Thank you and feel free to check out the complete slide deck here.