Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell toys?

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Shockwave
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Shockwave »

You know what would be really cool? Is if Hasbro were to put out one catalogue each year showing everything that was going to be released in that year and, have people be able to preorder the things they want. And they could have either paper version mailed out to customers and toy stores or an online version at hts.com.
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Onslaught Six
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Onslaught Six »

Here's the thing, though, you can't do that with the kind of lead times there are. It's just not feasible. Things change, figures get shuffled around or cancelled entirely, and then Hasbro has to deal with tons of questions like "Hey we saw this thing and now it's gone, what gives?"

I mean, remember those stupid goddamn fucking Seacon repaints? That OTFCC was going to do? They showed those one time, one single time, and then they were cancelled, and Hasbro literally heard about them at EVERY SINGLE Q&A FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY until they were like "Jesus Christ fine we'll do them through the club store or whatever."

And you know what? I'm pretty sure you can STILL buy them from there because nobody actually wanted the stupid things.
BWprowl wrote:The internet having this many different words to describe nerdy folks is akin to the whole eskimos/ice situation, I would presume.
People spend so much time worrying about whether a figure is "mint" or not that they never stop to consider other flavours.
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andersonh1
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by andersonh1 »

Onslaught Six wrote:And you know what? I'm pretty sure you can STILL buy them from there because nobody actually wanted the stupid things.
That's because it was an ugly repaint color scheme. I never understood the demand for it, honestly. I guess I wasn't the only one!
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by BWprowl »

Shockwave wrote:You know what would be really cool? Is if Hasbro were to put out one catalogue each year showing everything that was going to be released in that year and, have people be able to preorder the things they want. And they could have either paper version mailed out to customers and toy stores or an online version at hts.com.
Onslaught Six wrote:Here's the thing, though, you can't do that with the kind of lead times there are. It's just not feasible. Things change, figures get shuffled around or cancelled entirely, and then Hasbro has to deal with tons of questions like "Hey we saw this thing and now it's gone, what gives?"
I know you're pretty much right about this, but then I remember that LEGO actually did used to do something like this (do they still? I don't really follow LEGO that closely anymore.). That is, having a Big Fucking Catalog you could have mailed to you that had a year's worth or half-year's worth or something of the product line in it, through which orders could be placed, including for sets EXCLUSIVE to the catalog.

Obviously a paper catalog is pretty much obsolete in this day and age, but Hasbro could potentially do something like that through HTS if HTS didn't, y'know, suck so mightily. Part of the problem is of course Hasbro's relationship with retail stores, who want to be the 'primary' sellers of Hasbro's product and don't want to be gone around by people buying directly from the manufacturer. This would, of course, hold more water if said stores would actually order anything beyond the first couple waves of a line, and actually keep the variety of them in stock regularly.

That said, I know we recently heard about Hasbro wanting to set up a system through Diamond that would allow people to pre-order individual figures, then pick them up at their local comic shop once they came out (pretty much the same way you can currently pre-order Marvel Select and DC Collectibles figures). And of course, there's always BBTS, and others like it.

Given their 'Collector' nature, Hasbro should AT LEAST have some sort of system like this in place for the Masterpiece figures they release, instead of idiotically releasing them to retail like any of their other kids' toys, usually as exclusives, just guaranteeing that they're going to get the shit scalped out of them.
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Shockwave »

Onslaught Six wrote:you can't do that with the kind of lead times there are. It's just not feasible.
Ugh... I'm sorry, but this is one of my biggest irritations on the internet. The "They can't do it" comment. Bullshit. Hasbro has the money, resources and authority to do what ever the fuck they want. If they want to produce only 10 new figures for an entire year and offer a catalogue showing that, they could do it. Realistically, something on a quarterly basis would probably work better, and since retailers want to be the first point of purchase for it, they can be the ones to have the catalogues in their stores. But, even if they did do an annual version and something does change or get cancelled, they could just, y'know, tell everyone. I mean, it's not like these things didn't happen back in the 80's, sometimes things changed or got cancelled or delayed. And back then, it was a lot harder to keep consumers updated on those changes, companies don't have that same challenge today.

As for the Seacons, I seem to recall they sold pretty quickly. And I actually thought they looked pretty cool. I never had the money for the set, but if I had, I would have bought it.
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by BWprowl »

Shockwave wrote:But, even if they did do an annual version and something does change or get cancelled, they could just, y'know, tell everyone. I mean, it's not like these things didn't happen back in the 80's, sometimes things changed or got cancelled or delayed. And back then, it was a lot harder to keep consumers updated on those changes, companies don't have that same challenge today.
Hasbro, for whatever reason, has big hang-ups about this sort of thing. It's why they have a stringent 'no photos' policy when they're doing brand-new reveals at BotCon and Comic-Con and the like, and why they go to pains to prevent images of prototypes from leaking out onto the internet (notice that early pics of protos and test shots don't show up NEARLY as much as they used to these days?). They absolutely do not want the public to know about what toys exist and what they look like until they're absolutely certain they're ready to go and know when they're going to be released. This is seemingly in relation to what Six mentioned: So they can minimize the amount of people pestering them with questions about WHY'D YOU CHANGE THIS? WHY ISN'T THIS COMING OUT? and so forth.
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Sparky Prime »

BWprowl wrote:They absolutely do not want the public to know about what toys exist and what they look like until they're absolutely certain they're ready to go and know when they're going to be released.
I wouldn't go that far. Even if Hasbro doesn't want early prototypes and test shots leaking, they still want to advertise upcoming figures to build interest and let people know what to look forward to. And even when things are ready to go and scheduled for release, they can still be cancelled. DOTM Soundwave and Wheeljack for example.
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Tigermegatron »

For the AEC TF toy lines, Hasbro placed Four or Five different TF toy catalogs inside the toy packages. Their was no fear of showing future waves toys that might get cancelled, Because each catalog only showed a wave assortment worth of toys.
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by Onslaught Six »

Part of the problem is of course Hasbro's relationship with retail stores, who want to be the 'primary' sellers of Hasbro's product and don't want to be gone around by people buying directly from the manufacturer.
Except that's not even what HTS is, either! They're just a retailer that buys only from Hasbro. Yes, really.
Shocktrek wrote:If they want to produce only 10 new figures for an entire year and offer a catalogue showing that, they could do it.
And have retailers tell them to go fuck off for the year? That'll go nicely with the shareholders.
BWprowl wrote:The internet having this many different words to describe nerdy folks is akin to the whole eskimos/ice situation, I would presume.
People spend so much time worrying about whether a figure is "mint" or not that they never stop to consider other flavours.
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BWprowl
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Re: Mini Toy catalogs inside new TF toys,do they help sell t

Post by BWprowl »

Onslaught Six wrote:Except that's not even what HTS is, either! They're just a retailer that buys only from Hasbro. Yes, really.
That's my point, yeah. In order to prevent guys like Wal-Mart and Target from getting pissed off over them selling their stuff directly, we instead get HTS which has to play by all the rules as a big-boy retailer, and that's why they *suck*.
And have retailers tell them to go fuck off for the year? That'll go nicely with the shareholders.
This is part of the problem with Hasbro, owning TF, being a straight-up retail toy company. They can't do a DC Direct sort of thing where they produce their own figures for specialty markets, Target and Wal-Mart have them by the balls and they have to produce primarily toys that cater to the markets they're trying to sell to, and trying to go around them to do their own thing is not going to go over well.
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