When Sam Kashani was a young boy, he built a city of Lego blocks in his parents’ basement. As an adult, he’s been building the Lego brand campaign by campaign, instead of brick by brick.
Kashani, senior manager of customer development at Lego Canada, has spent the last three years managing 12 of Lego’s brands, leading campaigns and developing promo strategies for new products. This spring he was promoted to customer development after working as an assistant marketing manager.
Kashani has led the launches of new sub-brands, like Lego Friends, which Lego counts as one of the most successful launches ever in Canada, and came up with creative ways of reaching new consumers, like the Quebec Lego Chimney Holiday Campaign. For Lego, Quebec is a tough market. The brand under-indexes in the province and faces the added challenge of brands being barred from advertising directly to children.
To solve the conundrum, Kashani led the creation of a campaign that focused on the family unit, including a spot that showed a Lego family at Christmas time. The campaign also encouraged families to build fireplace Lego sets that used smartphone screens to display the fire.
Perhaps his biggest accomplishment to date at Lego has been selling a scientific approach to marketing up the chain. When Lego’s U.S. marketing team shared their marketing model with the rest of the company, Kashani concluded the nuances of the Canadian market demanded a separate marketing model. He sold his bosses on the idea, taking on the task of building a new, Canadian marketing model on top of his already packed workload.
Lego Canada’s general manager, David Buxbaum says the model Kashani developed is the company’s second biggest globally and helped the brand “make smarter choices in terms of our return on investments and return on objectives.”
“He has an incredible head for numbers. He’s very quantitatively focused,” Buxbaum says. “As a result of Sam’s initiative and his stick-to-itiveness, we make much smarter marketing choices.”
Outside of work, Kashani also lends his skills as a marketer to the Iranian Canadian Community. Born in Iran, he grew up in Dubai before his family moved to Canada in 1998, just before he entered high school. Today he acts as the marketing manager for the Tirgan Festival, a bi-annual festival that celebrates Iranian art, music, dance and theatre at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. He also serves as publisher of the festival’s magazine.
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