The toy consumer gap. There are scenes from two very popular films of old: the piano scene from Tom Hanks’Big and the “Dunkin’s Toy Chest” scene from Macaulay Culkin’s Home Alone 2. These two stand out to me because as a child, unless you lived in the metropolitan New York are, you never once felt the joys of experiential retail while toy shopping. Don’t get me wrong, Toys R Us was great. But like Walmart and Target are today, the primary toy store of many of our childhoods was less a destination and more of a warehouse. Consumers want experiential retail for toys. And BuzzFeed’s latest off-shoot hopes to address it.
As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, younger direct-to-consumer brands are fleeing the constraints of online top funnel advertising for unconventional ways of reaching new consumers. Physical retail has been widely reported on as an alternative to top funnel customer acquisition. With the help of the Alibaba Group, we’ve steered a few well-suited brands towards one of the most promising growth opportunities: Chinese eCommerce. In this report, we detail why Chinese commerce needs to be top of mind for qualified brands looking to expand.
