Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler. Susan Thomas Gregory
its meteoric mark as one of the first companies to capitalize on crossing the educational toy market with the technology industry, producing what are often called “interactive toys” or “smart toys.” In the most basic sense, these are playthings with low-cost electronic chips embedded underneath a layer of soft material or plastic. When the chip is activated, the toy gives an aural or visual response; this cause-and-effect dynamic represents interactivity. What this translates to in toyland is generally gizmos that beep, play electronic ditties, and flash colorful lights, usually with numbers or letters emblazoned on them.
Presenting early academic skill activities in an electronic toy has come to define LeapFrog’s specific brand of learning. But it has also played a substantial role in transforming the definition of “learning” in the minds of consumers as well as the major toy producers. Today, when consumers are asked in surveys to describe an “educational” or “learning” toy, many mention an electronic gadget that displays a sequence of numbers or letters. Only a small segment of consumers prefers crafts or open-ended playthings, such as building blocks or dolls, to learning toys. According to analysts and marketers, LeapFrog’s marketing efforts have convinced customers from all walks of life that an electronic device is not just an educational toy but the educational toy. Such toys attract a wide customer base — what marketers call “mass and class” — low-income buyers as well as well-educated upper-middle-class consumers. According to LeapFrog’s own market research, and also focus groups conducted by Scholastic, LeapFrog products are especially popular with foreign-born Latina and Asian mothers for whom English is a second language, who believe that the toys will teach their children to speak English. These mothers are willing to pay a premium for LeapFrog products, often forgoing other toys or educational materials, such as books.
LeapFrog’s success, and its brand of “learning,” has had monumental repercussions in the toy industry. Just seven years after it was founded, LeapFrog became the third-largest toy maker in the country, behind Mattel (number one) and Hasbro. LeapFrog’s popularity forced the hands of Mattel’s and Hasbro’s early childhood divisions, Fisher-Price and Playskool, respectively. Largely because of LeapFrog’s popularity, Fisher-Price and Playskool now offer toys for babies or toddlers that feature electronics and claim to offer some type of academic lesson. According to toy-business executives and analysts, buyers for the large retail stores have come to believe that infant and toddler toys claiming to teach early academic skills produce the most profit. Toy makers explain that when they show toys that don’t promise to help a child learn, the buyers refuse to stock them. One high-level toy designer showed a group of major chain buyers a stuffed animal whose body parts — eyes, nose, and so on — were named on labels stitched into the fabric. The primary purpose of the toy was to help parents teach their babies the parts of the body. But, the designer said, the buyers balked: “They said, ‘Mothers don’t want to teach their children about their bodies. That’s not learning. Mothers want their babies to know the alphabet. Put ABC on it, and we’ll think about it.’” The company acquiesced, even though letters and numbers had no relation to the focus of the toy. It is sold today as a toy that promotes learning.
NO “LEARNING” TOYS
LeapFrog producers cringe at stories like this, even though they may ostensibly be good for business. The producers argue that slapping numbers and letters on a toy does not lead to learning. The company prides itself on the research behind each toy. Starting with the flagship product, the LeapPad, for which it is still best known, all LeapFrog’s subsequent learning products — ranging from TurboTwist Handhelds for middle-schoolers to Leap’s Phonics Railroad for toddlers — have been based to some degree on academic research. LeapFrog producers are passionate about research. They read stacks of educational journals and attend academic conferences. The company pays a number of professors in the field of education to consult on toy design. In fact, the LeapPad was inspired by a Stanford professor’s research on preliteracy. While launching LeapFrog, the founder, Mike Wood, consulted with the reading specialist Robert Calfee (who has chaired LeapFrog’s Educational Advisory Board since the company’s founding) and learned that preliteracy skills depend on “phonetic awareness.” That is, before children can learn how to read, they need to develop the specific understanding that words are composed of strings of smaller sounds. Supporting phonetic awareness is what adults versed in reading to children are doing, usually without thinking about it. As they read, they listen for the child to repeat a word she finds interesting; when she does, they enthusiastically repeat the word, too, and they sound it out slowly and clearly. For example, a child might point to a picture of a ladybug in a book and try to pronounce the word herself: “Yay-dee-buh!” In response, the adult might happily affirm: “Yes, that’s right! That is a LAY-dee-bug! A LAY-dee-bug!”
With the LeapPad, Wood set out to replicate electronically that encouraging of phonetic awareness and, beyond that, to achieve electronically what every book-loving adult does when reading to young children: sound out words, ask questions about characters, repeat favorite sections over and over again. Physically, the LeapPad is a booklike hardware and software unit designed for four- to eight-year-olds. A plastic base houses a touch-sensitive web of electronics as well as a low-cost sound chip. The software component is not a disk containing a program but a series of interactive books made of specially coated paper, similar to the material used for shipping pouches. The books fit into the plastic base and the two components work in tandem. When a child uses the stylus tethered to the base and touches one of the pictures or icons in the book, she can have the book read to her or hear each word, as well as its phonemes, pronounced. A child can use the stylus to point to an assortment of icons to activate even more reading-related activities.
But replicating what has always been a fluid, enjoyable experience for adult readers and young listeners turned out to be a very complicated technological task and a major graphics design challenge. Where a parent or other caregiver would naturally follow a child’s interest, asking her spontaneous questions about a particular appealing character, for example, the inert LeapPad can only simulate interactivity. To do this effectively, product designers had to presume that the child using it might be interested in everything, so they had to anticipate every question, or as many as possible. A great deal of stuff — icons, instructions, questions — had to be packed onto every page, with the result that a LeapPad “book” resembles a children’s book only in that it has pages.
Engineering the maximum percentage of learning per square inch of toy became the mission of LeapFrog under Wood’s leadership (he was ousted in 2004). All the effort that went into LeapPad’s design also meant that it cost more than the average children’s toy. The first LeapPad debuted as the Phonics Desk in 1995, with some success. But in 1999 it was relaunched as the LeapPad Learning System and became the industry’s top-selling toy in December 2000 — the first for an educational toy in more than fifteen years. Today LeapPad’s hardware component has a list price of fifty dollars, with LeapPad-compatible “books” listing for fifteen dollars apiece. This makes the LeapPad one of the most expensive mass-produced toys on the market, but that has not impeded sales. According to the company, 77 percent of U.S. households with young children own a LeapPad.
Quickly, LeapFrog sought to reach even younger consumers. In 2001, the company released My First LeapPad, which is shaped like a bus and geared to three- to five-year-olds; in 2003, the LittleTouch LeapPad (list price thirty-five dollars) debuted, aimed at babies and toddlers from six to thirty-six months. LeapFrog’s product line had always been geared to the age range from prekindergarten — four-year-olds — to the tail end of junior high school. But its forays into the baby and toddler toy category were so successful that LeapFrog officially launched its LeapFrog Baby line in 2004 with great fanfare at the International Toy Fair, the annual trade show held in New York City. By 2006 the lineup had grown far beyond the LittleTouch LeapPad and plush interactive dolls to include more than three dozen toys, including the Learning Piano, which offers three “LeapStages” activity cards that trigger different musical and voice recordings (names of instruments and how they sound; snippets of songs like “London Bridge”; and a counting song featuring a cow, two pigs, three sheep, four cats, and five ducks); the Learn & Groove Musical Table, which plays forty “learning songs” and introduces letters and numbers in English or Spanish; the Learn & Groove Alphabet Drum, which, with each bang, displays