Magnet Company Gets Kids To Play With Words

Selling to Kids, August 5, 1998

Magnetic Poetry, the company that helps adult consumers fashion prose on their refrigerators and filing cabinets with magnetic tiles, has set its sights on getting kids to play with words.

The Minneapolis-based company has launched a new initiative into the kids market, with kits containing age-appropriate words and tile sizes to fit into classroom use.

Its new line of kids products now can be found in specialty toy, gift, book and teacher's supply stores, teacher's catalogs and six major children's museums across the U.S.

Though the kits are educational in nature, making teachers and parents a perfect target for marketing efforts, kids also are attracted to the playful possibilities of creating sentences and dismantling them a minute later to start all over again.

"It's such a natural with kids because they are learning language and they love hands-on activities," says Jane Love, director of marketing, Magnetic Poetry. "It's open-ended, there's no right or wrong way to do it and there's always an element of discovery and exploration."

The company, which markets more than 50 magnetic word tile products, came to national prominence during its "Magnetic Poetry Walls" campaign in 1997. The company placed six 8-by-20-foot freestanding metallic walls in public places like Wall Street's World Financial Center, complete with a random selection of magnetic word tiles. Other sites included Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Buoyed by the success of the project, the scope of the campaign tripled this year, with the company designing special walls and kits for use in children's museums, libraries and schools.

Sales at Magnetic Poetry were $5.8 million in 1997, up from $2.2 million two years ago. The company has sold 2 million kits, but declined to specify how many were children's kits.

Poetry For Pint-Sized Set

This year, the company attended Toy Fair in New York to launch its kits for early and elementary readers, a glow-in-the-dark-kit, an alphabet kit and a "Really Big Words" kit. It also attended the International Reading Conference in Orlando in May to promote the product to teachers. It also has targeted teachers and parents, not only marketing to them but consulting with the target audience in elementary schools and informally asking for feedback about the products.

Magnetic Poetry has not marketed directly to kids, believing that the $20 price tag and educational characteristics make it a better sell to adults. But getting the product into the classroom is just the first stop before the magnetic words make it into the home, says Love.

"It's not a licensed product, or a Barbie, that kids will see on TV and ask for," says Love, previously a product manager for Golden Books and at Tonka. "But if kids can get their hands on it in the classroom, they can go home and tell their parents about it." Interestingly, the adult kits have drawn a large following among teens, and the company will target them via its first-ever national ad campaign, in Seventeen, to break in the fourth quarter. It also will run an online poetry contest for them on the magazine's Web site. (Jane Love, Magnetic Poetry, 612/338-6399; John Larson, Kohnstamm Communications, 612/228-9141)

Kids Museums Make Good Partners

Magnetic Poetry of Minneapolis has focused on reaching kids not only in the classroom but in children's museums, a venue that has become increasingly popular with parents and kids.

The foray into children's museum is well-timed. According to the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying organization Association of Youth Museums, projected attendance in 1998 is 22 million, a dramatic increase from the 9.3 million who visited one of more than 150 children's museums in 1996.

At the beginning of 1998, Magnetic Poetry founder Dave Kapell contacted the Minnesota Children's Museum and sold it on the idea of bringing a scaled-down version of the wall project into the museum.

The company partnered with six children's museums in April in conjunction with National Poetry Month in Boston, Brooklyn, Indianapolis, Manhattan, Minneapolis and San Francisco. Special events were held in the museums using the walls and the child-sized word tiles. The children's kits also are sold in the museums' gift shops.

The concept needed some refinement for kids, says John Larson, account executive at Kohnstamm Communications, the PR firm that originally conceived of the wall project and oversees its execution.

"The existing walls were too stark for kids - they want something fun," says Larson. "The new walls look like little refrigerators, and they are lower to the ground to accommodate small children." The walls also are built on wheels, so they can be easily moved into schools or libraries. Museums pay for the walls on a sliding scale, starting at $1,000, says Love. (Jane Love, Magnetic Poetry, 612/338- 6399; John Larson, Kohnstamm Communications, 612/228-9141)