Melissa & Doug

Building a direct connection

Value Created

01.

Produced a 4X ROI

Melissa & Doug / Overview

Taking a national toy brand D2C  by uncovering actionable insights about high-value micro segments.

Challenge

For Hero Digital’s recent partnership with Melissa & Doug, we were tasked with crafting their direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy.

Through research, we learned that 44% of their target audience, wealthy urban parents, would rather not buy from online marketplaces—they actually prefer to do business with brands that align to their values.

However, convenience is sometimes hard to overcome—unless there’s a specific reason for them to engage with a brand directly.

Solution

Melissa & Doug’s digital strategy was all about building direct, deep relationships focused on attributes like inspiring free play, durability, and sustainability

Knowing these factors are really important values for their customers, we set out to build those into the brand promise and experience—then specifically measure how well we deliver on them over time.

The roadmap and associated business case required to meet their direct-to-consumer ambition delivered significantly.

What we did:

Defined the audience—including the micro-segments with the greatest potential to unlock growth.
Opportunity sizing—identified the share of D2C toy wallet opportunity.
Competitive analysis—shared how to strategically integrate journey mapping against values for core audiences.
Gap analysis—roadmapped how and when to execute, providing now/next/future recommendations.

Services

Research and Insights
Experience Strategy
Digital Business Strategy
Content Strategy and Creation

Explore the Details

Connecting the physical to digital

A digitally-enabled in-store purchase experience was designed and developed for Xfinity Prepaid. The first-of-its-kind experience was built to meet core customers where they shop, grow sales channels, eliminate friction at point-of-sale, and minimize the need for sales team training.