Client: Multinational corporation
Agency: Dalziel & Pow →
Helping a multinational corporation find their angle on the next generation of kids.
The client
A global toy and kids' entertainment company — €8.8bn annual revenue, decades in market — was losing relevance with 8–12 year olds.
The problem
Sales were declining in that age group across a specific European region. They needed to understand why, and they needed their own marketing team to see the problem differently.The brief came with constraints: no direct research with kids, no interference with product strategy, start regional.
The approach
Before we could brief a solution, we needed to understand the audience from the inside out. I led an extensive research phase that went beyond traditional consumer studies — mapping the cultural landscape kids actually live in, across every platform where they spend time. That meant deep dives into TikTok, YouTube, Discord, Roblox, Twitch, and Reddit, alongside generational data, family dynamic research, and local cultural analysis across the Benelux, Nordics, UK, Italy, and Germany.
The goal wasn't to catalogue what kids like. It was to understand the psychological drivers behind why certain products stick and others disappear.
The strategic shift: the popular toy recipe
We built the answer into a tangible strategic tool — a popular toy recipe. A framework of psychological need states and social dynamics that explains what makes a product travel through peer culture, earn status within it, and stick. Specific enough to brief from. Practical enough to test.
Every platform, every market pointed to the same insight: kids don't buy toys, they buy social currency.
The recipe reframed the entire go-to-market challenge: stop leading with what the toy does. Start with what it does for a kid's place in their social world.
The insights soon started falling into psychological needs categories, and the recipe structure started to take form.
The output
We ran workshops with the client's head marketing team across five European markets, putting the recipe to work — using it to stress-test existing campaigns, reframe briefs, and prototype new approaches to product launches and activations. The goal wasn't just to present findings. It was to change how the team thought about every brief that came after.
