Golden Bear's MD sheds some light on the origins of the firm's latest brand, Sleep Tight All Night, and explains why more firm should create their own IP.
The vast majority of Golden Bear’s revenue comes from licensed pre-school lines but we wanted to leverage all the skills, knowledge and relationships within the company to develop our own intellectual property.
The result is Sleep Tight All Night – a unique sleep aid system that helps kids get to sleep, helps them get back to sleep and, most importantly, tells them when it is time to get up, but also offers a day mode which allows the child to play with the toy during the day.
Before we started the project, we undertook extensive research which showed that sleep and sleep issues are one of the top topics of conversation on mums’ websites and something that every parent encounters at some stage of their kids’ lives.
Supplementing this, we found lots of academic research into the best sounds and colours of lights to help children get to sleep and, most vitally, get them back to sleep again should they wake up. We also needed to identify a simple instruction that kids aged between 18 months up to six or seven years old would understand.
We settled on traffic lights which kids are very familiar with early on, so a light that is red signifies ‘stay in bed’ while a green light means ‘get up and go’.
The major difference that Sleep Tight All Night has to our pre-school licensed lines is in the marketing. With most of our hero pre-school items. there is a strong level of pester power from the kids. In the case of Sleep Tight All Night, it is primarily a solution for parents that kids will grow to love once they have it.
Therefore, our marketing is more targeted to parents that would normally be the case.
We’re excited about working extensively with Channel Mum and Tots 100 bloggers as the product has the potential to change parents’ lives massively for the better and we can’t wait to see the difference it makes for these keys influencers, which will undoubtedly encourage word of mouth amongst parents.
Sleep Tight All Night has shown us that we can leverage our key skills, experience, knowledge and relationships to create our own intellectual property and bring it successfully to market.
I’d encourage all companies to do the same.
