This blog post is part of an assignment for COMM 465: Marketing Management, with Phaedra Burke. 

Hasbro is a firm that has very wide breadth, with brands ranging from Marvel to Candy Land, from Lite-Brite to Nerf, and from Operation to Scrabble. Full list of brands can be viewed here. One of their new product lines is Nerf Rebelle, a feminine twist on the Nerf toy weapons usually marketed towards boys.

Segmentation and Targeting:

As our textbook states, firms increase their product mix breadth in order to capture new markets. Hasbro seems to have created Nerf Rebelle in order to target young female fans of the new movies Brave and The Hunger Games, both of which star female archers who “rebel” from the female norm. However, the segmentation is more specific than that. Hasbro seems to have taken into account a psychographic that has previously not been targeted in their marketing. Featuring weapons that are pink and purple with names like Heartbreaker and Sweet Revenge, the toys seem to speak to girls whose self-concepts include being strong, independent, and feminine.

Developing the new product:

A recent interview with the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Hasbro, John Frascotti, indicates that Hasbro used customer input when they were generating the idea for a new product. Speaking to the concern that some consumers have that Nerf Rebelle is perpetuating stereotypes, he said, “I think if anything, we went into this without any stereotypes and instead talked to young girls, found out what they wanted, and then designed a line of products that addressed that opportunity,” What girls wanted, he said, was Nerf toys that boast both high performance and a design made especially for them. Frascotti also said that Hasbro did research for over 3 years while creating the line and that they conducted premarket tests, wherein girls thought the names of the products were “cool”.

All in all, despite the controversy over the potential sexist nature of Nerf Rebelle, Hasbro seems to have effectively used segmentation to seek out a new target market and used effective means to develop a new product for this market.