SINGAPORE: Lego fans produce 20 times more Lego-themed online content than the brand itself, a senior marketer at the toy company has revealed.

Last year, the iconic toy brand was ranked by global consultancy Brand Finance as the world's most powerful brand, ahead of luxury brands such as Ferrari and Burberry.

While the company has partnered with the likes of Star Wars and the makers of The Lego Movie, Lego believes its fan-produced content is more important.

"What's more important is the content that consumers produce. They produce 20 times more content than we do daily," said Lars Silberbauer Andersen, Lego's Senior Global Director of Social and Video.

He added that brands must work to understand the social needs of their consumers and act in real-time to engage them effectively. (For more on Lego's marketing strategy, read Warc's exclusive report: Lego evolves its brand with social media and content marketing.)

"Social media comes down to our social needs. If we want to understand social media and leverage on social media, we need to understand what makes human interactions and communications possible," Silberbauer explained.

He added that internal research, testing and learning has led Lego to identify two key social needs of its consumers – building it together, and the pride of creation.

The brand has also used the differences in creativity between adults and children to develop its social media-driven projects.

"The challenge is that parents see Lego like a construction toy: you have a manual, you build it. But the magic happens when you smash everything and you rebuild it according to your own creativity and your own language," Silberbauer said.

"Every time we build a campaign that is true to these needs, we see it taking off," he added. "We see it getting much more reach, much more traction."

Data sourced from Warc