As a part of their global Play is Your Superpower campaign, LEGO Group announces that it will launch the #LEGOSerlahkanKreativitiAndaMY push in Malaysia in October.

To encourage more parent-child playtime, the LEGO Group is bringing LEGO bricks to the Golden Screen Cinemas (GSC) Playpark at IOI City Mall from 5 to 6 October 2024. Visitors can build and help promote the campaign on social media with the #LEGOSerlahkanKreativitiAndaMY @ LEGO and #LEGOMY tags.

To further promote the campaign, LEGO-themed MRT coaches would operate on the MRT Kajang line from 1 to 31 October 2024.

At the same time, LEGO had commissioned “Malaysian personalities” to boost the campaign and would showcase their brick builds at the Bukit Bintang MRT station throughout October.

It is clever that the LEGO Group used a study by Edelman DXI that they commissioned to show that family playtime is essential for the well-being of children and parents in the announcement. Over 61,500 parents and children (aged 5 to 15) from 36 countries participated in the study, which took 6 weeks to complete. However, Malaysia is not on that list of participating countries.

While the campaign is packaged as encouraging play and creativity, only one of the events promotes play, and all favour creativity on the ever-isolating social media instead.

That said, I’d love to catch a ride on the LEGO-themed MRT coach to see if it is more than just a wrap and if it can survive Malaysians.

I also believe that the LEGO Group can do better. They could release Malaysian-themed sets that are designed to be built by a family, hold an event at a park where families could buy bundled sets at a discount and construct them there, or even have mini family-building activities at LEGO stores—in other words, promoting family playtime by actually encouraging family playtime.

Perhaps their hands are tied, they found that these building activities don’t work here, or the Malaysian market is too small. Nevertheless, I wish they could do more.