> The LEGO Foundation has announced it will donate 600 LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals worldwide
Seriously LEGO, 600 for a worldwide campaign, your marketing campaign didn't have more budget than this? This would barely be enough to make a meaningful difference for Copenhagen alone!
Using sick children to do brand marketing is always walking on a tight rope, but if you're actually helping them why not. But by giving only 600 LEGO sets, it's even below the smallest Rotary fundraiser you can find in rural places, this is beyond ridiculous.
I get it. This is a smaller set, around 500 pieces, so a retail value of about $50 US.
So you're looking at an outlay of about $30,000. Which isn't a lot for the most popular toy brand on the face of the Earth. Lego could probably afford to provide a Lego MRI for every MRI machine on the face of the Earth and not break the bank.
HOWEVER. This does look to be an employee-driven initiative. And I don't mean it's something chaired by an employee, I mean a dude in Billund just did this. Then brought it to management for expansion. And it's only a single part of Lego's Learning Through Play - (https://learningthroughplay.com/) program, so it's possible this is like the extent of this project's budget.
It's employee driven in collaboration with Odense University Hospital. It's part of a study, so handing out lego sets to every hospital on the planet with an MRI machine just doesn't make sense.
The sets are assembled by volunteer Lego employees with bricks provided by Lego.
Yes, I was pointing out that the second layer is kind of close to the surface as well.
The surface layer is that Lego is providing sets to hospitals. Which is nice.
The second layer is that they're just giving them out to 300 hospitals. Which seems stingy considering Lego's revenue.
The next layer is that it is an employee driven collaboration with other entities to conduct a study to see how to best construct and use these sets to put kids at ease. Which is more complex.
The problem doesn't come from the fact that they're making a study or that it is employee-driven. It's that it's being co-opted as a marketing campaign with this publication. Nobody forced them to write such a PR piece, nor to write it in this way making grandiose claims about being a game-changer and being distributed worldwide.
When you use such a title
“The LEGO Foundation to donate LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals globally” for an employee-driven initiative that merely involves 600 LEGO sets, your marketing is a shame.
I was also surprised by this low number. Even if we go low and assume only a 10% profit margin on LEGO sets and assume the average LEGO set costs $46.31 (https://brickset.com/article/31370/a-decade-of-lego-in-graph...). And assume this set costs $1,000 for LEGO to produce (low economics of scale).
That means donating 600 sets will cost them the profit of selling:
(600 sets * $1,000) / (10% profit * $46.31 per normal LEGO set sold) = 129,562 LEGO sets.
(129,562 / 220,000,000) * 1 year = 0.0006 years ≈ 5 hours and 20 minutes of profits.
If I calculate my income over a 5 hours and 20 minutes period (based on dividing my monthly salary by working 36 hours per week), it would be equivalent to me donating €160 to a good cause. Not something I'd publish a proud blog post about.
> And assume this set costs $1,000 for LEGO to produce (low economics of scale)
This makes no sense unless you think they are making pieces that are only for this set which is almost certainly not the case considering others have posted rebrickable links for essentially the exact set[1]
I was assuming here that they need to create a build instruction, box etc. and ship all these out for only 600 sets instead of millions like normal sets.
Of course I have zero insight into LEGO's operational processes and logistics. Which is why I took numbers that would make LEGO look more generous than they probably are: low profit margin, high cost per MRI set.
> The LEGO Foundation has announced it will donate 600 LEGO® MRI Scanners to hospitals worldwide
Seriously LEGO, 600 for a worldwide campaign, your marketing campaign didn't have more budget than this? This would barely be enough to make a meaningful difference for Copenhagen alone!
Using sick children to do brand marketing is always walking on a tight rope, but if you're actually helping them why not. But by giving only 600 LEGO sets, it's even below the smallest Rotary fundraiser you can find in rural places, this is beyond ridiculous.