Fidget Spinners and the 4Ps of Marketing
When marketing a brand, it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends. Fidget spinners ended up becoming one of the hottest products on the market. And with good reason. They offer customers an entertaining way to pass time. They also help those in need of stress relief or those looking for ways to improve their concentration.
About 30 years ago, a similar device was patented by Catherine Hettinger. She intended to decrease boredom in children and keep them occupied and away from bad behavior. Hettinger filed a patent application for a “spinning toy” in 1993.
She approached Hasbro to make the toy, and they rejected her. Hasbro declined to pursue a deal after market-testing it. Catherine gave up on her patent, ending in 2005. This allowed companies to sell the product independently from her.
The First Lesson in Marketing
Timing is everything. She had the right product at the wrong time. Not having a clear vision, she was not able to send the right message to the right target market. If she held onto that patent, she would have been a rich woman today.
The Torqbar was a pioneering spinner invented by Scott McCoskery that operated using a ball joint and bearing system. In September 2015, the Torqbar was made available to the general public via a YouTube video. To make these spinners available to the general public, MD Engineering LLC soon filed for a patent.
The Rise and Fate of Fidget Spinners
Fidget spinners were dubbed the “must-have office toy for 2017” in an article written by James Plafke for Forbes on December 23, 2016. Late in March, users started posting videos of themselves using and critiquing fidget spinners on social media sites like YouTube and Reddit. According to The Boston Globe, fidget toys in general have “entered the mainstream,” and the associated Fidget Cube toy is becoming more and more well-liked. Several Etsy vendors make and market specialized spinner designs.
According to Money magazine, Google searches for “fidget spinner” spiked in April 2017, when the fidget spinner’s popularity started to grow significantly. On May 4, spinning variants had taken over every position on Amazon’s top 20 toy-selling list. The fidget spinner was labeled as a fad in numerous newspapers, and some writers compared its popularity to that of water bottle flipping in 2016. “So-called fidget spinners,” low-tech, low-cost stress relievers, are a massive phenomenon sweeping the country, and merchants can’t keep them in stock,” the New York Post said on April 27, 2017.
Marketing Fidget Spinners as a Health Product
The supposed health advantages of fidget spinners are possibly another part of their sales success. Finding a cause to play with them nonstop, no matter how neat one thought they were, may have been the slingshot to fame. Hettinger originally developed something that is extremely reminiscent of the spinners that are currently available.
The spinners were meant to help people with ADHD and anxiety, two conditions that weren’t discussed in the 1980s but became an increasingly studied subject after 2010. This straightforward and entertaining remedy sounded promising and easily obtainable. These are recognized issues that many people experience today.
Promoting Stress Relief and Enjoyment
The fact that this toy is intended to be a relaxing tool that can help one stay focused served as the marketing component that finally made it popular. Several people advertise fidget spinners as a stress reliever on Amazon. Sales of fidget spinners skyrocketed in 2017 even despite the lack of data to support its claimed ability to miraculously reduce stress.
This allowed the product to reach a very promising wide age demographic; children and adults.
As a result, parents purchase them for their children because they want to see an improved academic performance. Adults purchase them for personal use so they can concentrate better at work. Truly, the marketing for this tiny plastic toy is brilliant. Their exclusion from schools simply fueled more sales.
The Reseller Game & Product Pricing
Businesses were purchasing fidget spinners for approximately a dollar each from China and reselling them for around $20. The $20-and-under fidget spinners that are so popular in the U.S. were an unstoppable success. Retailers were unable to hold onto the products as Chinese production ramped up for the United States in large quantities. According to Google, the fidget spinner market began to boom in April 2017. Because there are so many of them, schools have already started banning them.
Online Placement and Sales
Companies like Fidget360, sold and produced these for the market in Fall of 2016. By March 2017 the country started picking up on this phenomenon. By April there was a full blown boom and first movers in the market made thousands of dollars a week that jumped on the trend. Fidget spinners accounted for 17% of toy shops’ online sales at their height of popularity. Pop-up shops and major retailers sold directly to the public and they were everywhere;
- Theme parks,
- Sports teams,
- Music festivals,
- Corporate business,
- Summer camps,
- Community events,
- Non-profit fundraisers,
- Conferences, etc.
Understanding the Concept of Product Value
In marketing, you try to show customers why a product is worthwhile. People purchase products because they believe they will improve their lives. It is on this concept the health and beauty industries generate tremendous annual revenue each year.
Product value is a representation of how much benefit a customer believes they can get from using a product. You can calculate the value by measuring how a product specifically meets customer needs.
The fidget spinner was a cool-looking item that children and adults alike considered an improvement in the quality of their lives. This refers to use for either medical or recreational purposes. It was almost too easy to sell a popular product that claimed to treat people with anxiety. This is something that’s one of the most pervasive problems we confront today. And it was a successful campaign. All factors were perfectly in place for fidget spinners to gain popularity quickly.
The Fad Comes To An End
By the end of May, sales of fidget spinners had drastically decreased mainly due to school bans. According to Google Trends/Statista data as of June 26, 2017, it appeared that most of the world has grown disinterested in the device. Later reports stating that “unusually large quantities of lead” were discovered in a few fidget spinners was published in July of that year. As if this wasn’t enough to worry parents, several tales of kids choking on Fidget Spinner parts started to surface. And so, the “Fidget Spinner Age” was over.
