Challenges in the Mediatization of a Corporate Brand: Identity-Effects as LEGO Establishes a Media Products Company

The LEGO Group (LEGO), one of the world’s leading toy companies known primarily for the famous LEGO brick construction toy, decided to enter into the market for children’s media products in the mid-1990s. Consequently, in 1996 LEGO established a subsidiary to develop and market media products for children, LEGO Media International. This initiative was part of LEGO’s overall corporate branding strategy: LEGO would become a true corporate brand, meaning that the LEGO name and values should no longer be connected mainly with LEGO’s main product — the brick — in the minds of consumers and employees but, rather, with the wider set of LEGO values related to children’s play and development. Through the strategy to take the LEGO brand into the media business areas — which further included children’s clothes, amusement parks and lifestyle products — the company’s top management sought to realize the ambition to become the world’s most well-known brand among families with children between the ages of 0–16 by the year 2005. By seeking to incorporate media products (which, in Lego’s case, meant interactive software, music, film, television and magazines for children) into the product line, it could be argued, following Hjarvard (2004), that the LEGO Company and corporate brand were increasingly mediatized.