Back when I was pregnant with Baby Number One, I was pretty picky when it came to brands. The baby monitor, baby swing, high chair and portable baby playpen — to say nothing of most of the toys that my daughter played with during her first few months of life — were all emblazoned with the one logo that I had come to associate with safety and quality in children's products: Fisher-Price.
I think the hormones of pregnancy were causing me to dwell on my old childhood. My three younger sisters and I had spent hours playing with (and fighting over) 1970s vintage Fisher-Price Little People. And our toy box contained a number of other classic Fisher-Price toys: the corn-popper, toy telephone, stacking rings, shape sorter and other toys that can still be scooped up at thrift stores and garage sales (if you're lucky). That's why, when it came time for me to start rounding up baby gear for my own child, it was only natural that I would gravitate towards the Fisher-Price mini-catalogue that was stapled into every issue of the pregnancy and baby magazines that I studied with such intensity. That's how much trust I had in this brand.
It takes time to build up trust in a brand. In my case, two generations. But that trust can be squandered if a company's future products fail to live up to what marketers refer to as "brand promise" — what consumers have come to expect from that brand.
The parents who bought their children the toys affected by last week's massive Fisher-Price toy recall had every reason to expect that those toys would meet product safety standards. The company's announcement that it is recalling 967,000 plastic preschool toys because the products have been found to contain excessive quantities of lead has many parents justifiably concerned. Long-term exposure to lead can lead to neurological problems and other health issues in young children.
Manufacturing products in overseas factories may seem like an attractive option when you're trying to reduce the per unit price on manufactured goods. (The Fisher-Price toys affected by the recall were manufactured by a third-party in China.) And in an era when giant retailers and big-box stores are pressuring manufacturers to pare down their per-unit costs to unprecedented levels, it may seem like there is no alternative but to outsource manufacturing to other parts of the world.
Still, it's hard to put a price on consumer confidence, and the costs of regaining that confidence once it has been shaken can be considerable, particularly if, in the case of Fisher-Price, there have been other high-profile recalls in the past.
Wouldn't we all be further ahead — parents, kids and manufacturers — if the emphasis shifted back to quality, not quantity, in toys: if kids had a few good toys rather than rooms full of toys of lesser quality?
That would allow manufacturers to raise toy prices by a few dollars, where necessary, to reflect the actual cost of manufacturing these toys under safe, carefully monitored conditions; and maybe even to shift more manufacturing jobs back to North America (so that more North American parents could afford to shop somewhere other than the places where the cheapest of the cheap toys are sold).
I may be living in Toy Utopia, but I'd rather have my child playing with A Few Good Toys rather than growing up alongside a pile of cheaper toys, some of which may be dangerous, to boot.
How about you?
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