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I remember seeing that. The toy part of the bar scared me considering how much new product they were putting out and yet expecting a minimal increase. And consumer goods, while nice, is not the best way to make money on something when you're a manufacturing company.And I don't like the "life expectancy is shrinking" argument either. When I took marketing, customer retention is drilled into us. To give up on it and just rely on new customers coming in is a dangerous game. If you don't have the faith in your to compete against the Next Thing, you run the danger of your customer base just bypassing you for the Next Thing.
I think it's a bit naive to think that the Mane 6 aren't selling well and Hasbro just hasn't noticed. Their sales keep going through the roof, so apparently someone is buying all these ponies.For what it's worth, the shelfwarmers where I live are often not the Mane Six. (Cherry Berry was the shelf-sitter from the pearly set.) Anecdotes are interesting, but they're just anecdotes. There's no way to tell if they reflect local trends versus broader trends.
Quote from: LadyMoondancer on February 12, 2018, 09:28:18 AMI think it's a bit naive to think that the Mane 6 aren't selling well and Hasbro just hasn't noticed. Their sales keep going through the roof, so apparently someone is buying all these ponies.For what it's worth, the shelfwarmers where I live are often not the Mane Six. (Cherry Berry was the shelf-sitter from the pearly set.) Anecdotes are interesting, but they're just anecdotes. There's no way to tell if they reflect local trends versus broader trends.It may be anecdotal, but I think it's more naive to assume Hasbro knows or even cares.Firstly, how much of product is getting returned to Hasbro unsold? We don't know. It's possible that if stores are clearancing stuff, they're not returning anything to the supplier. That means Hasbro already sold it, right? Another factor is that in the UK at least, we don't just clear our stock. We get excess stock from other places. Right now as I speak my local Entertainer has stuff marked Target in US boxes and my Tesco in London has Water Cuties marked Australia/Canada/NZ release. Aside from seeing the UK as a viable dumping ground for stuff (which has always been the case back to G1), and taking into consideration potential store deals with the US to import things directly, it is just as possible US store shelves clear of old stock more easily than UK ones do. Either way, we don't have official release dates that are stuck to and ponies do not come here in the right order. And it's very obvious something is shelf-sitting if it's there for four years.Not a single non-mane 6 pony has ever shelf-sat in any of these places beyond a period of 4-6 months. In some cases they're gone immediately. Mane 6 ponies can sit on shelves here for 4 years. It's circumstantial but it's compelling suggestion that kids are not interested in those particular items - they're more interested in the new.I've been watching this for a few years specifically so I'm not just making it up or assuming. It's all circumstantial but based on empirical evidence rather than my wishful thinking. My sister also works in the web promotion part of retail and I know which ponies her store has trouble shifting. It's not the non-mane 6. It's the others. That's a different part of the UK from the two I circulate in, so that's 3 different locations. Another thing that happens here is stuff comes on shelf and is on clearance the moment it is released. This sometimes happens with mane 6 and sometimes not. The stuff that's not mane 6 goes like crazy. Holly Dash was in my local store for 4 weeks max. Never came back. The Pinkie Pie from her set and the glitter hair ones (Rarity etc) from the previous RP release were still on the shelf long after Holly Dash had gone. My Smyths still has some of those ponies. And the ones with hairbands. But Pursey Pink? Long gone. Make of it what you like. It still seems to me that the mane 6 are killing the franchise and that keeping them going beyond g4 will ultimately kill MLP completely. At least here.Maybe in the US it's different. Maybe the mane 6 is more popular. It is true that playsets and stuff have sometimes come out in Europe with extra freebie non mane 6 ponies and it's interesting to consider why that happens, because it's not happening in the US release. These aren't store exclusives like Haven Bay. They're regional. Why are these more marketable in Europe than in the US?
I think it's a bit naive to think that the Mane 6 aren't selling well and Hasbro just hasn't noticed. Their sales keep going through the roof (...)
You'd think there'd always be a market for colorful fantasy horses, but apparently it's not that easy (the demand always did seem stronger in Europe compared to the US, but Hasbro prioritizes the US).
Hasbro is a big corporation with many different regional branches. There's a lot of levels and layers involved in organising and promoting a product like MLP and all aspects of the wider franchise. If Hasbro knew every detail of every sale they would be superhuman. It's crazy to think that they do. In the past, certainly, it's known that different departments in hasbro didn't communicate with each other very well (this from people who worked with Hasbro in the 1980s for Jem, rather than MLP). They've gone on record to say so. We know that a lot of things don't make a lot of sense in MLP distribution across the world. Hasbro UK and hasbro Europe are both in the UK, but aren't even located in the same country, let alone the same city. It seems mad to me to even think that Hasbro Inc as the mother company knows every detail of everything that is happening.Moreover, as regards not reordering stock, I think that subject was raised and discussed in this thread to differing degrees:http://mlparena.com/index.php/topic,390128.0.htmlWhich would suggest that yeah, they're not selling as well. Of course, here it's not necessarily a measure of whether they are or not, since as I said, we get the dumped stuff from other places. We also got Scandinavian EAH dolls and Spanish ones as well. So what's on our shelves from different toy shops is clearly operating on a different frequency to what's going on in other places - but if stores or manufacturers are offloading spare stock in the wrong packaging in another country, it says very clearly that they are not selling in the original country. In those instances, it might also be individual deals between stores, though I know Entertainer is a native British store and Smyths is Irish I think - but they have had ponies with Walmart labels on them, rather than Asda, who are Walmart. Tell me that Hasbro knows all about all of that and can quantify it. I think it's highly unlikely that they do. If stores have contracts or bulk deals with a manufacturer then returning stock might not be as economically viable as selling it off elsewhere. We also have a clearance type store called TK Maxx here which also gets a lot of pony stuff (and MH actually) discounted after it's left the main shelves. Again, do we think Hasbro orchestrated that?Credit where it's due, Hasbro have created a very successful brand. But saying they know everything about all their sales and understand their target market is ridiculous. And that's before factoring in any warping of the target market produced by the unexpected brony phenomenon.In any case, I reiterate. Kids do not need a new mane 6 character every 4 weeks. What people are forgetting is that it is cheap and easy to keep producing the mane 6. For a new character, more design processes need to go into play. Decisions on plastic colour, on hair, on symbol. Artwork, etc. Yes, mane 6 get redesigned into new styles, but the fundamental features and the components used are probably mostly the same, allowing hasbro to acquire them in bulk and save on production. Hasbro don't need to sell every mane 6 pony to make a profit if they are able to get them made more easily in quantity than if they were to create a whole new set of characters from absolute scratch. Common sense really. They're out to save costs and make money, but they're not really that interested in making sure everyone loves the mane 6. They're interested in selling enough mane 6 to keep the brand ticking over while occasionally shoring it up with a bit of new stuff to make people think the line has more to it than it actually does. But by oversaturating the mane 6 - whose popularity depends on the TV show that might yet vanish - they're also threatening the future viability of the line. If it's just the same as what happened before, it's not going to have the same success as G4 did from G3/3.5. Quote from: SpikeTheDragon on February 12, 2018, 12:20:31 PMYou'd think there'd always be a market for colorful fantasy horses, but apparently it's not that easy (the demand always did seem stronger in Europe compared to the US, but Hasbro prioritizes the US). This is the single most frustrating aspect for me with MLP in general. Although it has improved between G3 to G4 in some cases with stores in other countries outside of the US picking up store exclusives, I don't know that it's as good as it could be. I feel like we're punished for not being America most of the time. Considering that Europe was more loyal to the brand in G1 and G2, the fact that a lot of G3 ponies turned out to be US releases only or store exclusives in the US only was a slap in the face to the international market. I am still interested as to why the exclusive ponies with certain playsets in G4 has happened in Europe and not the US, though. I'd love to know the thought process behind it.
One thing that I think people forget, is that Hasbro doesn't pick what ponies go to what store and in what quantities. HASBRO isn't punishing UK stores. They make an assortment every year- then RETAILERS place their orders. So the people to pester about why we don't have enough ponies is not Hasbro- it's your own retail stores.
I think Hasbro is holding serve right now. That's the primary strategy. They're depending on consumer goods right now which can carry what's left of G4 to its conclusion. And, frankly, Hasbro has become a rather lazy company. Developing new characters would mean work, and they figure they can get away with this. We will see if that's the case.