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, generating €8.8bn in annual revenue.
The problem
An iconic brand was losing relevance with 8-12 year olds in Europe. Their Head of Marketing felt that the way the internal teams were seeing the target audience was out of sync with the current culture. We were asked to find a fresh angle on the target cohort and offer a way to apply it to marketing processes, not just hand them a deck. Constraints were tight — no direct research with kids, no product-strategy changes, regional start.
The insight
Kids don’t see themselves as kids. They want to show off and be cool as much as grown-ups do.
I led a research phase mapping the cultural and psychological world these kids actually live in — across TikTok, YouTube, Discord, Roblox, Twitch and Reddit, layered with generational and family-dynamic data across five European markets. The pattern was consistent everywhere: kids don't buy toys, they buy social currency. It was a positioning problem — the brand was selling features and developmental benefits into a market that buys status.
The solution.
A framework.
I translated the research into a reusable positioning framework — a "popular toy recipe". Based on psychological need-states and social trends, the framework is designed to make a product travel through peer culture and stick.
Concrete enough to brief from, testable enough to validate.
The insights soon started falling into psychological needs categories, and the recipe structure started to take form.
A workshop.
Then we ran positioning workshops with the client's executive marketing team first. The structure of the workshop was designed to shift their understanding of kids by sharing all the relevant to the cohort latest trends and cultural movements, give them the framework to ideate in groups, and then pitch the new product marketing ideas.
