As you may know, LEGO sends out a quarterly online survey to the LEGO fan community to get valuable feedback, spot the trends and patterns within the community, as well as to learn about the wishes of LEGO fans. LEGO uses the information gathered from the surveys to understand how to serve teen and adult LEGO fans better. 🙂

The surveys are sent out to LEGO clubs, forums and blogs, and they in turn encourage members of their communities to take a few minutes and fill out the surveys. I have been kind of lax about this myself (bad-bad admin), and sometimes didn’t inform our readers about the survey as there was other pressing news to publish, but if you would like me to be more diligent about it please let me know. Once LEGO analyzes the results, they also share their findings with the community. Below you will find the results of the second survey from 2014 – I think you will find them quite interesting:

Dear LEGO fan community, we surveyed over 4500 AFOL (Adult-Fan-of-LEGO) and over 500 TFOL (Teen-Fan-of-LEGO) in May 2014 as part of an ongoing initiative to better understand the Adult Fan of LEGO community motivations and activities.

Nearly a quarter of AFOL respondents hailed from Asia and an additional quarter from North America. Other regions that represented just under 10% of the respondent base included Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and Southern Europe. More than half of the AFOL respondents have been engaged with the community for three years or less, and the bulk were between 25-44 years old.

AFOL who are likely to recommend the product cite aspects of creativity and use of LEGO products by all ages. Those who are much less likely to recommend cite price as a major reason.

Though about half of AFOL are mainly solitary builders, there are differences between various regions. The most solitary builders are in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Australia/New Zealand; the most social, in Central/South America, Asia, Central Europe, and Southern Europe. In Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe, and in Asia, participation in various types of activities is lower. And, frequency of building is lowest in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Asia.

Just over half of AFOL respondents belong to a LUG (LEGO User Group), though Western and Eastern Europe have the lowest LUG participation. AFOL in Western Europe and in Asia say they don’t belong to a LUG primarily because they are not aware of any; however, AFOL in all other regions who are not members say they don’t have time.

As you can see there is a lot of valuable information here. First of all it seems like the community is steadily growing, with new LEGO fans joining on a regular basis – the LEGO fan community in Asia has been especially swelling. It is interesting to note the age-range of most of the responders; LEGO fans in their mid-twenties should be over their Dark Ages (when they tend to leave the hobby for other interests), and people in their mid-forties are the generation that first grew up with LEGO and are now back into the hobby with money in their pockets.

I’m curious of how LEGO is going to respond to the concerns that their products are still perceived as too expensive. Based on a previous report I read I know that LEGO’s management is very well aware of the state of the economy around the world and have been responding to the situation with a lot of smaller, cheaper sets, as well as other strategies. I just hope their response won’t be lowering the quality of their products.

What do you think? Did you find the survey results interesting? Anything you noticed that was particularly insightful? Do you fill out the surveys regularly? How do you like the questions? Would you want me to post about the quarterly surveys and the results more frequently? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below. 😉