20 NEWS ANALYSIS
All I want for Christmas
THE CHRISTMAS LISTS COMBINED
Nerf Vortex Nitron (Hasbro)
Fijit Friends (Mattel)
LeapPad (LeapFrog)
Let’s Rock Elmo (Hasbro)
Cars 2 Finn McMissile (Mattel)
Kidizoom Twist (VTech)
Moshling Treehouse (Vivid)
FurReal Cookie (Hasbro)
Dance Star Mickey (Mattel)
Milky The Bunny (Flair)
Doggie Doo (John Adams)
Ninjago Fire Temple (Lego)
Bop it XT (Hasbro)
Innotab (VTech)
Air Swimmers (Wow Stuff
Represents collated data from Christmas lists of Tesco, Toys R Us, Argos, Smyths Hamleys, Littlewoods, Firebox, Amazon,
Play.com, John Lewis plus the TRA’s Dream Dozen. Only UK retailers were considered and supplier lists were excluded.
NOVEMBER 2011
AND 2011’s must-have toy is…. Well, it seems that this year there isn’t just one, but a whole raft of products which are going to boost retailers’ coffers throughout the festive season. This year Tesco started the predictions a little prematurely with its Christmas top ten on June 6th – a whole month earlier than we’re traditionally used to. At the top of its ranked list was Mattel’s Fijit Friends,
We took the major retailers’ Christmas lists and combined them. The results show that in terms of support from UK retail, not one single toy got its nose out in front. In fact four toys: Let’s Rock Elmo and Nerf Vortex Nitron from Hasbro, the LeapPad Explorer from LeapFrog and Mattel’s Fijit Friends all earned themselves an equal number of Christmas list nominations.
I check the Dream Toys list and it has no comparison to what we sell.
Things are really slowing down on the big box items.
Paul Carpenter, Totally Toys
which at the time Tesco senior buying manager John Stanhope described as ‘this year’s must-have gadget.’
Although the purple, squishy interactive toy had gained a valuable endorsement from the UK’s grocery goliath, as more Christmas lists were released, more competitors to the ‘must-have’ crown emerged. Fijit Friends continued to earn itself a regular placing on the subsequent top toys lists, but it was joined by some serious competition.
EVEN SPREAD
Where the media and the public have become trained to look for a single front-runner each year (think Furby, Thunderbirds Tracey Island and Buzz Lightyear), 2011 has us spoilt for choice. So why is this? On announcement of the Dream Dozen, Gary Grant, chairman of the TRA’s Dream Toys selection panel, commented: "This year we’ve seen some amazing technological advancements from the toy industry. This doesn’t mean to say that the
toys are ‘techy’; rather that technology has been used to enrich the whole experience of play.” Grant has a point. In the Dream Dozen and in our collated list, technological advancement is a common theme.
Is that the problem? While most of the product is innovative, it’s not strictly unique because the boundaries are being pushed across the board. Where there’s a Let’s Rock Elmo, there’s also a Dance Star Mickey and where there’s a LeapPad, there’s an Innotab. Perhaps this year more than any
other, there are just many more stand out toys, and that can’t be a bad thing for the industry. Without being limited to a few focal products the market stands to benefit from a more even spread of the consumer spend, Parents won’t have to fight over the last Buzz and kids won’t have to settle for whatever’s left on the shelf come Christmas Eve.
INDEPENDENT CHOICE Undeterred in our quest to identify a top Christmas product, we asked indies what they thought their top sellers would be.
On receiving the first round of nominations it became clear the
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