Retail choice: Hamleys' Harry Potter Lego promotion

by Tim Jeffrey, Retail director, F1RST, Marketing 14-Jul-04

Depending on your age, your angle of approach to Hamleys' Harry Potter Lego promotion will deliver differing degrees of promise. From a child's point of view the window display featuring the 'Knight bus' is fantastic and delivers all it sets out to do, demonstrating once again Lego's flexibility and ability to deliver topical product in the right place at the right time. But venture inside the store to Legoland and you'll be disappointed.

The staircase down to the basement is underwhelming and a missed brand opportunity. At the bottom to one side are a full-size Harry and Hagrid, while straight ahead is a pile of Lego buckets of bricks on special promotion.

The Potter product is metres away, stacked supermarket-style on gondolas.

It's now a fair distance from the window and the customer's enthusiasm is growing more distant with every step. No wow, no carry-through, no focused story or clever mix of themed product to encourage 'pickability'.

To have concentrated so much effort on the window while ignoring brand and product presentation is to ignore the law of drivers and deciders.

Get the customer's attention, tempt them with choice and make the act of selection the easy bit.

As a play on that old advertising adage: great sizzle, alas skimped on sausage.

- Design agency: IDa Creative Link.