Way back in May, we covered a unique new product service by LEGO that was developed in cooperation with the massive online marketplace platform Amazon. This was LEGO Duplo Stories, which works as a downloadable Skill for the Amazon Alexa smart speaker to narrate interactive stories based on recently released LEGO Duplo educational building sets.
This is merely one of several significant collaborations between LEGO and Amazon, and it apparently runs against the grain of what other companies on the online retail giant are doing which is plastering search advertisements. Instead, LEGO’s keener on content production for consumers on Amazon.
The LEGO Group’s Head of Emerging Platforms, James Poulter, is seeing the rising trend of Amazon Alexa owners using the smart speaker for online purchases; it’s telling over 80% of 2017 online sales combined for LEGO, Hasbro, Mattel and Nintendo were done courtesy of Amazon, according to a Jumpshot analytics study.
According to Poulter, other companies could do well to follow LEGO’s example of looking at Amazon as more than “just a retail platform”. While he does concede that there are risks to companies cooperating with Amazon to such an extent, one can’t discount the potential to be capitalized on, now that the retail giant is steadily increasing its variety of content services like Freetime Unlimited subscriptions and of course, Alexa.
To this, LEGO’s emerging platforms boss is seeing possibilities: in the vein of Amazon Alexa and its LEGO Duplo Stories, there would come a time when a customer’s LEGO order done on Amazon, for example, would have new Skills being downloaded onto the user’s Amazon Alexa speaker, which will then ask the customer if they were satisfied with their delivered service.
In addition to Alexa Skills, LEGO is also looking on developing AR options with Amazon as innovative means to sell more products, letting consumers preview their online purchases before committing to buy them, for example.