You want web with that?
Right now, somewhere in the world of physical product marketing there’s a conversation in progress that goes something like this: “how can we use the digital/web/mobile platforms to enhance our product/offer?”.
It’s a great question. It’s a tough one to answer, evidenced by the number of web and mobile sites that tell you about a product, let you watch a video and maybe buy the product – and that’s it. That’s as far as most brands go in using digital channels to enhance the experience of their real-world products.
Lego sell building blocks. They’re focussed on selling blocks: standard blocks, Harry Potter blocks, World Cup Soccer blocks and they know what they’re doing.
What Lego has done better than most brands is innovate via the inclusion of digital. Years ago Lego introduced Lego Digital Designer – software that let you create lego block based models in a 3D desktop modelling program. Once you’d completed a model you could order the blocks and once they arrived you could create a real-world version of your virtual model. A great example of the digital channel enhancing the real-world experience of a product.
And now they’ve done it again with Life Of George, Lego’s first ever bricks-and-iPhone game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHZwSOVKBY
Adding a physical component to a casual mobile game is really an experiment for Lego to gauge what tech-savvy adults like. The popularity of sandbox games like Minecraft is proof that plenty of people love to build any and everything, though they probably play with their iPhones more than Lego sets these days. So can the Life of George app get more grown-ups playing with Lego bricks again?
