Did you know that toys act as masters of transformation, transition mediators, cosmic manipulators, vehicles for imagination, conscious illusions, psychic integrators, life balancers, outlets for aggression, conflict solvers, primal comforters, islands of happiness, guarantors of youth, rule breakers, revolution instigators, life framers, uncritical companions, objects of care, caregivers, psychological nourishment, silent companions, mind feeders, thought instigators, action generators, tools of development, means of self-assertion, laboratories of the possible, creation triggers, expressions of individuality, personality constructors, writers of our destiny, vital experiments, world reinventors, freedom inducers? Successful toys have the ability to create frenzy, euphoria, exhilaration, exultant joy, gaiety, gladness, and laughter that absorb us completely, intensively, and tumultuously. Understand the deep motives underpinning our toy buying behaviour and build toy brands and narratives that engage people at a profoundly human level.

1. BUILDING
TOY BRANDS
THROUGH
INTRINSICALLY
ENGAGING
NARRATIVES™

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

3. … 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.

4. This methodology helps marketers develop
Intrinsically Engaging Narratives™

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

6. 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

7. 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.

13. 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.

14. ACHIEVEMENT: Toys are
tools of development and
a means of self-assertion.

15. As toys are agents
capable of having an
effect and as we get great
pleasure in anything we
can do effectively, toys
promote the greatest
growth in every living
person.

16. CREATIVITY: Toys help us
create and express our
individuality. In play
children use all their
being, from instincts to
acts, feelings and
thoughts.

17. 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.

18. REASSURANCE: Moving closer to
the dominant motives, toys
make us feel safe and happy.
Toys represent a source of
comfort – something to turn to.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Toys 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.

22. TRANSFORMATION: One
of the deepest motives
for buying toys is their
transitory nature, their
very capacity to be
vehicles for the
imagination.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

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

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

29. Successful brands
coherently express
the fundamental
human motives
driving their
category

30. BRAND AVIATORS™
specialises in activating
the unique codes of
your brand, those that
engage people at a
profound human level
using a three-phase
methodology

31. Phase 1: Map the territory
The first phase of the
methodology deconstructs the
fundamental human
motives driving the sales and
profit of the category,
establishes the relevant
psychographic territories and
reveals the way that the
brands are mapped in
people’s mind

32. Phase 2: Give soul to your
brand
To be authentic and engaging,
narratives must always be sourced
from the core of the brand. The
second phase captures the core of
the brand, and mobilises its genuine
codes in order to satisfy our
common motivations relative to the
category.

33. Phase 3: Enrich people’s
lives
Powerful strategies require
effective articulation. In this
third phase, the consumer
proposition is translated into
ownable experiences written
in the language that uses our
primary emotions as
structural elements.

34. Engage BRAND
AVIATORS™ to help you:
1. build brands on
human fundamentals
2. align all brand
communications under
a master idea that
works across different
cultures
3. develop Intrinsically
Engaging Narratives™

35. BRAND AVIATORS™ is trusted by some of the world’s
leading companies:

36. To receive in-depth analyses of the
motives underpinning buying
behaviour relative to specific
categories of goods, click the button:
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