The video received more than 50 million views and the campaign received 145 million impressions, with 500,000 engagements on Facebook and Twitter. The results for the campaign were impressive. ‘But really when you see a Barbie doll that’s been played with, she’s a souvenir of incredible adventures and imaginative journeys.’ ‘Often people think of Barbie as a brand that stands for perfection and beauty,’ says Duncan. For Makeunder Mondays, the brand shared images of dolls with messy hair and covered in crayon marks, depicting how girls truly play with Barbie. The film formed part of a wider campaign called You Can Be Anything, centred on Mattel’s belief that ‘When a girl plays with Barbie, she imagines everything she can become.’ On Instagram, Mattel celebrated Throwback Thursdays with a retrospective of Barbie’s previous careers. In the hidden-camera film, little girls role-play different jobs to the surprise and delight of the adults around them, for example, pretending to be a professor in a real-life university classroom and tending to animals in a veterinarian’s clinic. Often if a child is engaging with the doll on her own, you don’t hear anything, it’s happening in her head.’ To make that pretend play visible, Mattel created an online spot called Imagine the Possibilities. ‘If a child is drawing a picture, they can share it with their parents, it’s a benefit that’s tangible and immediate. ‘Compare it to arts and crafts,’ says Shore. The problem is that imaginative play doesn’t necessarily have a creative outcome that parents can see. ‘We wanted to make sure we communicated that the benefit of Barbie lies not within the doll but within the imagination of the child who plays with her,’ explains Duncan. This hypothesis was informed by a 2014 Mattel experiment called The Barbie Project that documented girls playing with the doll and their parents’ reactions. The toymaker believed that parents would see the value of the brand if they watched their daughters play with Barbie. They are reinforcing and reinscribing this particular beauty ideal.’ ‘However, they’ve had such longevity and popularity, that they do have some responsibility. ‘We cannot place all of the blame for the beauty ideal problems we have in Western society on Mattel,’ says Rebecca Hains, a children’s media culture expert and professor at Salem State University. Parents worried that Barbie symbolised an unhealthy focus on aesthetics. The doll has been accused of glamourising an unrealistically thin body type and positioning blonde hair, blue eyes and big boobs as the ultimate in feminine beauty. That is the reason the conversation around her gets so heated and passionate.’ She’s this American icon, and with legendary status comes incredible responsibility. ‘Barbie unjustly becomes a symbol for a lot of issues of female empowerment and female body types.’ ‘People feel deep emotions about this thing,’ explains Robert Best, Barbie senior designer. ‘Few women are as well known as Barbie, so it’s easy for her to become a target,’ adds Miller. That says more about the way that the doll was seen in culture, than what the moms thought about Barbie.’ ![]() A lot of moms were ok with Barbie, but they would never give her as a gift at a birthday party. ![]() ‘That meant she was a roadblock, she was not allowing her daughter to play with Barbie. In contrast to earlier generations, the millennial mother is much more focused on what her children are consuming, says Matt Miller, executive creative director at Mattel’s advertising agency, BBDO San Francisco. ‘These moms said, “The brand isn’t reflecting the world my kids are growing up in, it isn’t reflecting diversity, the values of what I want as a parent.”’ ‘We weren’t hearing the emotional connection to the brand,’ explains Michael Shore, Mattel VP of consumer insights. The American toymaker commissioned a sentiment analysis study and found that an emerging segment of young mothers did not have positive feelings about Barbie. ‘She was struggling in the marketplace.’ Mattel could not ignore this lack of interest in its most important brand, which Silver estimates makes up 15% of its business. ‘Barbie was faltering as a brand,’ says Jim Silver, editor of toy review site TTPM. Over the past few years the doll’s sales have steadily declined, and from 2012 to 2014, they decreased by 20%.
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