For the vast majority of her life, Barbie has gotten a lot of heat for sending the wrong message to girls. Since the 1950s, Barbie’s blonde-hair, blue eyes, and literally unrealistic body shape have been put under scrutiny for setting an impossible standard of beauty and perpetuating a superficial, ditzy stereotype. Many have found it concerning that young girls aspire to be “just like Barbie.”
While I don’t think Mattel has any intention of jeopardizing anyone’s self-worth, there have certainly been some questionable marketing moves on Barbie’s part. While over the years there has been Presidential Candidate Barbie, Veterinarian Barbie, and even UNICEF Ambassador Barbie, many cannot overlook the very blatant emphasis on beauty and the hypocrisy embedded in the Barbie brand. An example of this is when Mattel launched a Barbie in 1992 that was programmed to say “Math Class is Tough.” Though Barbie had ambitious careers throughout the rest of the 1990s and into the 2000s, in 2009 Mattel did it again by introducing “Totally Tattoos Barbie” where girls could apply a “Ken” tramp stamp to their doll.
Barbie’s new campaign attempts to extinguish any hint of the shallow, Malibu Barbie persona Barbie has embodied for so many years. The campaign puts all of the emphasis on Barbie’s career accomplishments instead of on her blonde hair or cute clothes. It doesn’t tell any lies about the Barbie brand, but it portrays Barbie in a completely different light than in the past. It’s a dream big, aspire to greatness, pave-your-own-path campaign. In addition to the commercial, Barbie has short videos on her YouTube channel starring successful women mentoring girls in a variety of fields, in everything from dance to firefighting to engineering.
The tone of this commercial is completely unlike any Barbie ad I’ve ever seen. Usually Barbie commercials involve overly ecstatic pre-teen girls, the color pink, and some over-processed promotional song. This campaign, however, flips the Barbie brand on its head and conveys a degree of authenticity that has never really been seen in past Barbie commercials. Instead of announcing what’s new in the world of Barbie, the commercial reminds consumers of Barbie’s heritage as a career woman. This commercial is different in that Barbie invites girls to be themselves, instead of living up to an idealized image that Barbie has represented in the past.
From these commercials, it’s apparent that Mattel knows that the Barbie brand needs to be relevant to its purchasers, who are primarily moms. As women’s roles are changing (case in point: women’s share of the labor force has risen from 30 percent in 1945 to over 50 percent today), Barbie is too. I think because of this cultural shift, moms today want to teach their daughters about ambition and independence now more than ever. This new campaign aligns with these values and attempts to start a relevant dialogue with Barbie purchasers. Barbie, in this campaign, repositions itself as a toy that will help emphasize good values, instead of something simply bought to quell tantrums at the toy store.
Overall, I think the best part of this campaign is that it bakes authenticity into the Barbie brand, making the brand relevant to its target customers. Even though Barbie is a multimillion dollar, global brand, this campaign does a great job at making the brand genuine, down-to-earth, and relatable on a personal level by portraying that the Barbie brand holds the same values as its customer. This value alignment is a quality crucial for any big brand to survive in the competitive marketplace.
Alison Henley is a senior Business and Enterprise Management major with a Marketing concentration and a Sociology minor.
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