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Email to Don Martin, Marketing Director, Playbox inc

  (Jan 23rd)

  Subject: Summer activity range

  Don,

  Just a quickie. The New Opportunities team monthly brainstorm tossed a few ideas around yesterday for the summer activity range and I thought I’d run this one past you. The basic concept is pretty simple, (brilliantly so, in fact). What we have in mind is a toy pitched at the 8 to 15 yr age group. It’s outdoor, multifunctional, rugged, suitable for boys and girls, and I reckon we should be able to keep the cost down below £20 (Though I’m sure manufacturing will find a way to jack that up somehow. We should talk about that sometime, by the way. We’d be able to sell a hell of a lot more if only those folks could get their costs under control) Anyway, we’re targeting pretty much across the whole middle income market. Anyone with around 30 - 40 square feet of space in fact. We’ve roughed out a couple of diagrams for you to see (in the mail), but basically it consists of two vertical supporting rods (Design will be able to sort out the detail) suspended from a horizontal beam - and this is the really neat bit - one of the new graduates came up with this one by the way, worth keeping an eye on that boy I would think - anyway his suggestion was to use the branch of a tree to provide the horizontal support - neat eh? Anyway, at the bottom of the supporting rods we put a small horizontal platform, suspended between the two rods, and the idea is that the kid sits on this platform and sways back and forth like a pendulum. Still a bit of detail to sort out about the attachment at the top, but ‘keep it simple’ should be the watchword. Not sure about how we'll power it, several suggestions yesterday, from mains power through a step down transformer (expensive), to springs or tensioned elastic - maybe we should do a range?. Actually I favoured the unpowered version, personally. (It was that same graduate by the way, whoever recruited him did a good job) His suggestion was to use the child’s parents to push the kid from behind, with gravity assist to bring him back. I reckon it just might work. Several good selling points there, too. Interactive parent/child thing, no batteries, nothing to go wrong, (we should get Sally on to that) - keeps the price down too.

  Anyway, that’s the gist. Let me know what you think.

  Barrie Dean, Concepts and Market Development Group.