LEGO makes for a brilliant and satisfying case study for hundreds of reasons.
It helps that it’s one of the most beloved brands on the planet, appealing across generations and ages. It constantly remains relevant by aligning itself with quality licenses and innovations, whilst staying true to its own brand identity.
It also has achieved content marketing triumphs that most other brands would kill for and a social strategy that puts the majority of its focus on community engagement.
Therefore it’s great idea to check in with the company on a regular basis to see what it’s been doing on its digital channels, to offer inspiration for your own endeavours.
We also have LEGO’s global head of social media Lars Silberbauer-Anderson talking at our Festival of Marketing in November, so please join us for a two day celebration of the modern marketing industry.
10 days of Hyperlapse
Hyperlapse is a standalone video app designed by Instagram, allowing the user to capture high-quality time-lapse videos even if the smartphone is moving.
LEGO already has a very active Instagram feed, and its recent forays into video have been a pleasure to watch, however its Hyperlapse competition has seen LEGO create some of its best work and inspire the community it has built.
Users just need to create a LEGO themed Instagram using Hyperlapse, tag it with #HyperBuild and then they’ll be in with a chance to win one of 10 LEGO sets.
This is a fantastic way to encourage collaboration, spark imagination, get some killer evergreen content and reward loyalty.
Golden Brickies
LEGO has launched it’s own Oscar style awards ceremony called The Golden brickies, which awards various different category prizes to LEGO fans who create the best LEGO Star Wars themed image, video or set build.
The ceremony takes place at Legoland Windsor and the judging panel even includes Warwick Davis.
Followers have to submit their creation with the hashtag #GoldenBrickies on its Twitter, Facebook and Instagram channels.
LEGO is great at creating unique content for each of its social channels, encouraging fans to follow them on different platforms without getting bored of the same message. This cross-channel strategy is clearly much bigger than one social network and will hopefully drive traffic and achieve growth for each channel.
On Facebook, the competition is receiving a huge amount of engagement and shares, and LEGO shows a strong commitment to engaging in conversations with commenters.
The Awesome Alliance
The Awesome Alliance is a beautifully designed site full of huge images and full-screen video, which ties in to The LEGO Movie and offers interactivity, creativity and prizes.
When users sign up to the alliance, they’ll be given a mission. When it’s completed they can upload photos from their smartphone to the site and via Facebook and Instagram. The images are then voted for by other Alliance members and for each social media site they use, 500 points are added to their score. Entries that score the highest will win LEGO prizes.
Not only does this encourage a huge amount of sharing, and develops a whole other community for new users to be a part of, but it also extends the life of The LEGO Movie itself.
LEGO Ideas
One of the very first articles I wrote for Econsultancy was about LEGO’s crowdsourcing website CUUSOO. Recently CUUSOO has gone through a rebranding and is now LEGO Ideas.
The site works in exactly the same way as it did before. Users just have to think of a brilliant idea for a new LEGO set, share the idea with the LEGO ideas community and those members can vote as to whether it gets made or not.
After every set reaches 10,000 supporters, it is submitted for consideration by LEGO and if successful, will be produced with a percentage of the profits going to the inventor.
This is basically why I now own a LEGO Ecto-1 and Back to the Future DeLorean.
Crowdsourcing of creative design is a fantastic way to engage with your customers. It makes consumers excited about not just the purchase of a product but its development and the chance to work in collaboration with LEGO is every brick-builders dream come true.
Now let’s try and get this bad-boy made…
LEGO Bus Stop
One of the key ways that any brand can drive loyalty and positive awareness is to create moments of joy. Things that surprise people and inject a run-of-the-mill weekday with wonder.
That’s what LEGO did in June when it built a bus top entirely out of LEGO on London’s Regent St. (Just by Hamleys).
This is no ordinary Bus Stop! It’s a #LEGOBusStop! If you’re in London’s Regent St, then come and check it out! pic.twitter.com/Yv5dM8CaPe
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) June 20, 2014
This image filled my Twitter feed for a good few days, not because of the retweets but also because every single one of my London based friends, colleagues and followers went to check it out and take a picture.
LEGO’s global head of social media Lars Silberbauer-Anderson will be speaking at our Festival of Marketing in November, so please join us for a two day celebration of the modern marketing industry, also featuring speakers from Coca-Cola, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and many more.
