How Barbie got creative with culture to build brand resilience
Anticipation is growing for Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie. Ahead of the July release, Andi Davids, global strategic business director at Bulletproof says the message is clear: Barbie is back.
From high street to high fashion, lemonade to loungewear, soft pile rugs to secret menus, you’d be hard-pressed these days to find a category not hit by the ‘pink wave’.
This is exactly why the 64-year-old fashion doll turns out to be an unlikely – yet compelling – source of inspiration for business leaders increasingly grappling to boost resilience. A lesson in how to balance brand-led business strategy with culture-led evolution.
Imagination, life is your creation
Barbie’s trajectory perfectly illustrates the core tenet of bulletproof brands: root them in a fundamental human experience and find new ways to help people live it. Built on the universal truth that all kids dream about who they’ll be when they grow up, what Barbie’s done so well over the past few years is to reposition that act in line with technological, social, and cultural developments. Mattel recognized not only a shift in the role of play – from entertainment to education – but also in culture. One in which dreaming about the future moved from a quest for perfection to the fulfillment of potential.
But Barbie hasn’t always managed to keep in step with cultural shifts. Hot off the (not so high) heels of third-wave feminism, noughties moms no longer felt Barbie reflected their values, and weren’t buying the doll for their daughters. With sales falling for eight consecutive quarters, Mattel was faced with the possibility of the first generation since 1959 being raised without Barbie.
You don’t need a miniature pair of plastic glasses to see where they went wrong. From Kate Moss’s waif to Pamela Anderson’s pin-up, beauty in the 90s and early 2000s had never been so unattainable, and Barbie, with her famously dysmorphic figure, had become the poster child for superficiality and unrealistic standards. Set amidst a cultural backdrop of ‘Girl Power’ and a surge in women’s rights acts, this was only exacerbated by controversial product innovations and one-dimensional brand collaborations. It was an era of empowerment and shifting ideals around femininity and equality, something Barbie could have easily leaned into, yet the brand’s meaning was slipping out of the hands of the business and into that of culture, becoming one of parody and satire instead.
