Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

My son is thrilled: today is the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick, which the boy rates as one of the lofty peaks of human inventive skill. More details:

From TIME: Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building

It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that then-Lego head Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the iconic plastic brick with its stud and hole design. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks for every person on the planet. And if stacked on top of one another, the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon.

The Age (of Australia): Children build on as Lego turns 50 today

. . . the traditional eight-stud brick, said Lego’s Australian marketing manager, Caroline Squire, is still the foundation of the business.

“(The brick) is a product that’s never changed from the moment it was conceived in 1958. The bricks that were sold then are still compatible with the bricks we sell in 2008,” she said.

“And, I think, for a product, in light of the way things have changed in the past 50 years to still be in the marketplace … still be a huge hit with kids and adults alike, is a massive achievement.”

Bloomberg News: Lego Marks 50th Anniversary With Reintroduced Building Bricks

Lego, which estimates that children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its bricks, was founded in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys. The company has made more than 400 billion of the plastic blocks since they were patented in 1958 by the father of current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Its name comes from the first letters of the words “leg godt,” Danish for “play well.”

The 5 billion hours figure might seem out of whack to me if I didn’t regularly see my son — and, for that master, his older sister/partner-in-crime — plowing hour after hour into their Lego constructions.

Two things about Lego’s marketing strike me as clever:

1. The company does a great job of turning its fans into BIG fans. My son, for example, gets three different catalogs or magazines from them regularly — something he loves since he’s seven years old and otherwise rarely gets mail. As though the bricks themselves weren’t enough fun to play with, he gets a new jolt of enthusiasm with each new mailing that Lego sends him. The effect is magnified since two of the publications (the fan-club magazine and the Brickmaster program magazine) are only for “members” of select groups. When you’re seven, it’s really, really cool to be a member of a club that sends you glossy full-color magazines — especially when the club also has a slick Web site complete with Bionicle video games.

2. Lego also continues to introduce one new tie-in series after another. These range from Bob the Builder and SpongBob SquarePants to Star Wars and now Indiana Jones. (My son and I are both excited about the Indiana Jones sets — and the wee motion picture that will soon accompany them — but given my druthers I might want this for my birthday. Which, by the way, is in June.) These themed toys coexist peacefully alongside Lego-invented series like Bionicle and EXO-FORCE, as well as the classic brick sets used to build fire stations, grocery stores, and the like. In short, Lego has given its fans many, many points of entry for enjoying their toys — a play that works even better because all of the sets have parts that work with all of the other sets.

These moves have helped Lego to shake off the financial doldrums that beset them in recent years. Given their renewed health, it won’t surprise me if I’m be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Lego with my great-grandkids 50 years from now.