The Plastic Blocks of Business: How LEGO reinvented itself and thrived

A digital and global age filled with increasingly busy individuals beckons change and adaptation. Few have weathered the storms quite like LEGO. They have answered the challenges of innovation and have simultaneously held to the simple toy that has always made them LEGO. Over the past decade, LEGO has soared within the toy industry, rising to become 2015’s most powerful brand in the world, according to global consultancy firm Brand Finance. One has to wonder how a company born out of children’s play habits from sixty years ago still thrives in this new age. Can a brand be reinvented?

Marketing expert, Dr. Damien McLoughlin, will address this very question as he presents his talk, Rebel and Rebuild, during Alltech REBELation. So in anticipation of the full story to come during REBELation, here are 5 Lessons from LEGO’s Story.

• The key to staying relevant, as is expected in business, is the customer. Any business can identify their target market. The value is in truly knowing the customer: their tastes, their time, their media influences. LEGO knows as much or more about children’s play than any company in the world.

• Both knowing your customer and identifying the most relevant version of your business are products of research.  In the 10 years that LEGO has grown into a toy manufacturing superpower, they have paralleled that growth with research expenditures.

• Mistakes are the evidence of experimentation and a direct line to innovation. No industry can survive without an investment in uncovering new knowledge. With that experimentation comes some failure, but those mistakes come together to unveil brilliance. Ninety percent of LEGO staff’s brilliant ideas never make it to market.

• There is something to be said for protecting your company’s creativity and the invaluable minds that produce the ideas often seen as far and away. Don’t allow statements like “that will never work” to kill the brilliance in futuristic thinking. LEGO keeps the workspace of their innovative team, known as the Future Lab, separate from the rest of the company.

• In attempts to be new and inventive do not stray too far the core experience that is the foundation for your business. The race toward the future while maintaining company identity was captured by LEGO Group CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as “about discovering what’s obviously Lego, but has never been seen before.”