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[Contn.] No Kidding The Toy Story
Children are children and toys will be toys. Right? Maybe not. Just ask any leading toy marketer. ''Children are growing out of toys at a younger age, even compared to three years ago,'' says David Selvaraj, Marketing Manager, Funskool India. Agrees Sangeeta Talwar, Managing Director, Mattel India: ''Earlier, toys were just about anything the kid could play with. But now parents attach importance to a toy's role in the child's development.'' That is pushing toymakers into creative toys and games. Funskool's range of 300 toys is getting more and more crowded with such products for children over eight years old. And Mattel segments the kids market with three brands: Fischer Price (for infants and kids under three), Wheels (for three-and-above boys) and Barbie (for three years-plus girls). ''We're dream merchants, helping the young ones express what they want to become,'' says Mattel's Talwar. What's helping companies like Mattel weave a story around their brands are informational/entertainment/merchandising resources in the form of television channels and character licensing options. ''We found that there is not a single channel that targets the seven to 14-year-olds as a whole,'' points out P.S. Sundaram, CEO, Intelivision, which just launched the country's first local 24-hour kids channel, Splash. Among other things, the channel dishes out animation, live action, feature films, educational programmes, music, and entertainment-based programmes. Advertisers, claims Sundaram, are coming by the droves. Splash may be the only channel of its kind, but it certainly isn't the only one jockeying for the kid-consumer's rupee. Walt Disney already airs programmes through eight platforms (including Sony Entertainment and Doordarshan) totalling 1,700 hours per annum. Cartoon Network turned 24-hours in India only this July, and recently kicked off character licensing in India. Hallmark Channel has earmarked five hours per day on its channel for kids. Nickelodeon, besides running the not-so-popular kids' channel, is available on Zee Television. Fox Kids airs on Star Plus. The proposed Disney Channel will be subscription-driven, but "advertisers seem keen to extend their ad monies to (us) too'', says Pratik Basu, CEO, Buena Vista Television India, a JV between Walt Disney and the K.K. Modi Group. Also on the anvil from Disney is a specialty store focusing on products for children upto two years old. ''Franchising of Walt Disney characters is already a Rs 100-crore business in India,'' reveals S. Nagarajan of Walt Disney Consumer Products in India.
Entrepreneurs Log In Just back from Singapore and South Africa, where he ran a software firm, Rakesh Sharma was looking to invest in a sunrise business, something that he could expand nationally. A chain of playschools, bundled with a crèche and day-care centre, Pink Elephant, seemed just the right opportunity to him. ''We can provide an environment as good as home and also something that the parent cannot-the peer group,'' says Ivy Learning's (the company behind Pink Elephant) Sharma. Rivals Kangaroo Kids and Shemrock have 19 and 23 centres, respectively. What makes playschools the hot-spot for franchising is the humongous consumer base. Nearly a sixth of the population in the country's top 25 cities falls in the pre-school range, below six years of age. A back-of-the-envelope calculation points to a market potential upwards of Rs 400 crore, assuming that just two in every 10 kids from a middle-class family sign up. Or, for instance, take the Rs 100-crore retail market for toys. ''The return on investment is lower than those of most other categories such as apparel, simply because toys are bulky and occupy more space,'' explains Ravi Malwani, MD of Kids Kemp, which also runs the 25-store toy chain, Toys Kemp. Now, Malwani is taking his pet idea, Kids Kemp store of children's apparel, national through a franchising route. In a country where 38 children are born every minute, Malwani has a market happening one way or another. 1 | 2 |
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