This pioneering research redefines the way we market toys. Artificial segmentations based on personality differences offer weak foundations on which to build brand strategies. To deeply engage us, a brand must have a solid inner architecture deeply rooted in the fundamentals of humanity. Beneath all the phantasmagoria of global marketing communication, lies order and rhythm, the source code of our human behaviour. Summarising the results of our research, this presentation analyses the fundamental motives underpinning consumer behaviour towards toys and proposes a way to build toy brands that engage people at a profoundly human level. Our fundamental human motives are like bare patterns in any language. Successful brands infuse the pattern, fertilising the basic forms, in a unique and profoundly human way, enabling people to experience deep patterns that make them feel alive. There is a direct correlation between our fundamental human motives, the most direct way to engage people, and the level of sales and profit. The efficiency of communication budgets is maximised when the authentic codes of the brand germinate the deepest motives driving sales and profit in the category. Today we have no excuse for saying that “we waste half of our advertising budget but we don’t know which half”.

1. CONNECT
CONTROL
The wheel of motives™
GROW
CARE
BALANCE
DESIRE
FEEL
SAFE
SEEK
PLAY
CREATE
DEFY
TRANSFORM
TM
TOY
BUYING
BEHAVIOUR

2. Hi! My name is Constantinos
Pantidos and I believe that
companies could improve
people’s lives even more
effectively if they had
deeper human insight.

3. Using a multidisciplinary
approach, BRAND AVIATORS™
have captured and presents, for
the first time, the fundamental
human motives underpinning
our toy buying behaviour at the
deepest levels of their
deployment …

4. … all the way from:
• their biological value
• to the neurosystems they engage
• to the cognitive operations and
psychological states they activate
• to the major social reinforcers they
cause and
• to the rich hierarchy of inherent
concepts they infuse into our
everyday life

5. This methodology helps marketers develop
Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™

6. The motives are
presented in order of
increasing relative
importance in line with
their power to influence
our buying decisions

7. CONTROL: On an initial layer of motivation,
toys give us the opportunity to exert a
greater control over our environment, and
even momentarily to be authors of our
destiny. Toys frame the owner as an
individual. Acting as objects and subjects at
the same time, they condition our behaviour
through the meaning and values that are
imbued in them.

8. DISRUPTION: More
significantly, we buy toys
because they help us defy
negative and too powerful
forces inside and outside us
and create our survival space.
In essence, play is a psychic
exercise which prepares us to
welcome life’s happiness and
sadness, triumphs and defeats.

9. Toys help us step
outside normal life,
bend rules, break
normal patterns. Toys
overturn the normal
order of values.

10. CARE: Inherently small and
helpless, dolls, teddy bears
and other babies and fragile
creatures, need our loving
care to survive, effectively
arousing our care giving
instincts. Our mind is shaped
in such a way that the more
one seems to need us, the
more we love him/her.

11. COMPANIONSHIP: On a
deeper level, toys are the
relational items par excellence.
Toys are always available and
provide their love freely and
unconditionally. Toys help us
connect with others and they
become themselves our real
companions.

12. INTELLIGENCE: Toys have the
capacity to feed the mind and
make us more well-rounded. They
prompt human thought, they
educate us they make us smarter.
Toys as the artifacts of play help
us to unify our personality, they
give us a sense of balance in life.
As Schiller and many other
thinkers believed, we are only
wholly humans when we are
playing.

13. ACHIEVEMENT: Toys are tools
of development and a means
of self-assertion. As toys are
agents capable of having an
effect and as we get great
pleasure in anything we can
do effectively, we like to
think that toys promote the
greatest growth in every
living person.

14. CREATIVITY: Toys help us create
and express our individuality. In
play children use all their being,
from instincts to acts, feelings and
thoughts. As all their personality
is expressed they, ultimately,
create a world infinitely richer
and more complete than reality
exemplified through the strikingly
common wellspring of similarities
in concepts of masterpieces and
children’s fantasy play.

15. REASSURANCE: Moving closer to
the dominant motives, toys make
us feel safe and happy. Toys
represent a source of comfort –
something to turn to. They are
small, cosy, placid, totally
predictable and thus they easily
become vehicles of affection and
consolation. With them children
keep reality at bay and take the
space to grow at their own pace.

16. EXPERIMENTATION: Toys help us
seek everything that is interesting in
existence. Play is anticipation,
expectation, arousal, excitement,
stimulation, arbitrariness,
incompleteness, thrill, risk, curiosity,
search, novelty of experience, an
attempt to diversify. They are
exploratory items that help us
satisfy our instinct to “try-out” life.
They trigger vital experiments that
open doors out onto the limitless
world.

17. TRANSFORMATION: One of the deepest
motives for buying toys is their transitory
nature, their very capacity to be vehicles
for the imagination. Play extends the
settings and expands the present. As is
the case in every ritual, in play there is
always transition. Play is a metaphoric
action, a suspension of disbelief, which
involves a transformation of the physical
world. It is a threshold, a passageway to
alternative worlds.

18. Children and adults alike,
eliminate reality to see
what cannot exist for the
time being. Toys play the
role of the mediators in
the transition and
encourage pretend and
make-believe play.

19. JUBILANCE: On the deepest layer of
human motivation, toys help us
express our exuberant nature, our
very motive to exalt life. Play is
autotelic, the end in and for itself.
Successful toys enable us to take
possession of the wholeness of life.
Capturing the intimacy of the moment,
they introduce us to the ecstatic play
of the world.

20. Toys have the ability to
create frenzy, intensive
pleasure, euphoria,
exhilaration, exultant joy,
gaiety, gladness, and
laughter that absorbs us
completely, intensively,
and tumultuously.

21. This map
illustrates the
way some
major brands
of toys are
positioned in
the consumers’
mind

22. Successful brands
coherently express
the very patterns of
our psyche

23. BRAND AVIATORS™ are trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

24. (Re)define your brand through
the human fundamentals if you
seek to:
• Deeply engage people locally
and across cultures
• Develop genuine concepts that
work year after year after
year
• Align all brand
communications under one
master idea
• Increase the ROI of all your
brand activities

25. My mission is to help clients
around the world build
brands that liberate the very
forces of life. Contact us now
for a free discovery audit by
clicking on the icon: