Barbie™ Changed the World Again. Can You?
Whether you’ve got Barbie™ fever or fatigue, or something in between, there are many reasons why it’s Barbie’s world right now — far beyond its current $1 billion+ worldwide box office success.
As the Principal of Salt & Wine, you can likely imagine that my news feed is pretty saturated with brand-related content. So I’ve been following the development and release of the Barbie movie for about eight months now as their marketing machine has been ramping up and their press strategy unfolded. Needless to say, I was looking forward to seeing the film but because of child-care challenges, movie date nights with my wife aren’t in the cards right now. But during a long-anticipated and remarkable gift from my incredible wife, I had the chance to go on a guy's weekend in Denver and just so happened to see the film with four of my dearest dudes.
None of us had pink to wear going into the film (and probably wouldn’t have worn it anyway), but all of us wished we were wearing pink coming out. And that, right there, is a clear sign that something about the 1 hour and 54 minutes we had just spent watching a movie had changed our views on Barbie and the world around us.
For me, what is most impressive about the Barbie movie is how it has successfully managed to breathe life into an ailing brand — and this is what I desperately long to see happen for many, many legacy Christian nonprofits who, acknowledge it or not, are ailing in today’s Western world.
The crazy thing about the Barbie movie’s brand-changing moment is that it reinforces the basics of what building a great brand takes. Barbie just does it so incredibly well that it feels as if there must be some radically innovative (or expensive) element to make its success unreachable.
While its scale of success and relevant reach may not be achievable, legacy brands can apply many takeaways and, God-willing, find their own ways to freshly change the world again.
So let’s break Barbie’s world down by the four core elements of what makes, or remakes, a great brand and hopefully reinforce how important these are for remaking any ailing brand.
Great Brands Are Relevant & Meaningful
Brands only matter to the people who choose them.
This is the most important reminder for anyone in the branding space — your brand only matters to the people who engage with you. Say all you want about your brand, and unless your audiences believe or say the same things, it doesn’t matter.
Barbie was an ailing and nearly irrelevant brand, full of a problematic history and skewed perfection-riddled iconography that was failing to adapt to a modern and culturally sensitive stage. And as much as Barbie has evolved over the years, the toy’s core DNA remained largely unchanged and its central role as an anchor of child-rearing was fading.
Good brands connect with people where they are — great brands do so on an emotional level.
If you wonder who Barbie’s core target demographic is, it becomes revealed, almost as a plot twist throughout the movie — it’s not girls, it’s mothers.
Mattel knows that by and large, Barbies are given to daughters by mothers, so if they need to reconnect with people where they are, they need to reconnect with mothers where they are— the ones who grew up playing with Barbies but no longer see Barbie as a way to help their own children navigate the world.
Mattel conducted market research in 2014 that revealed Barbie’s diminishing appeal and her inability to inspire and represent diversity. The research said that moms were choosing other brands besides Barbie.
To resurrect Barbie’s ailing brand, they needed to Reconnect with moms where they were and do so on an emotional level. Where did they start? They had a timely asset that they played so incredibly well — nostalgia.
Post-pandemic, our cultural moment is so hungry for nostalgia because we are looking for ways to remember a world that felt a little less polarized, a little less digitally addicted, and a little less lonely.
If you’ve seen the movie, I encourage you to go back and watch the main trailer for the movie to see the contrast between what the movie appears to be about vs what the movie is actually about — this is essential to understanding how Barbie marketed itself.
In the trailer, the Barbie movie comes across as this lighthearted, feel-good, nostalgic trip back to a land of childhood play and wonder, that isn’t trying to be anything other than O.G. Barbie (full of skinny, hyper-attractive, and idealized “people” living relatively full lives). It does a really amazing job of hiding all of the depth and power of the female experience found in the movie (more on that in a bit).
“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you”, “If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you”. That’s the opening of the trailer. The marketing played into nostalgia so incredibly well and did so because its focus was on reconnection — starting where they left off and allowing for all of the controversy and options and feeling to bubble back up to the surface and allow a stage of mixed emotions to come and be the judge of whether Barbie can still be relevant, or not.
Mattel knows that their success as a product brand isn’t going to be found in convincing their old customers (who are now adults) to buy their toys for themselves, so doing a movie that can be watched is a great way to get them to reconnect with the brand in a meaningful and relevant way.
But if their ultimate goal is to sell toys, they need to reposition the brand — and that is what the movie does that you don’t expect coming into the theater for the first time. What Greta and Warner did in the span of two hours is craft a deeply meaningful and self-aware story that fundamentally shifted the meaning of an eleven-and-a-half-inch plastic doll, and they did it on a deeply emotional level.
The Barbie doll means something different because of that movie.
All of a sudden, Mattel’s doll is an icon that acknowledges its problematic design and becomes a vehicle for an honest conversation about the female experience, about motherhood, daughterhood, and about what it means to navigate a still male-dominated society as a woman.
You simply can’t do this in a social media post or a direct-mail letter because you just don’t have a contextually rich enough media environment or focused enough moment in someone’s life to do it. But it’s not impossible to replicate.
For ailing nonprofit organizations, start by asking who you need to reconnect to, and what you can do to emotionally connect with them in a meaningful way. Look at your events and your in-person opportunities. Look at ways to capture a longer attention span like a webinar or a church gathering. And don’t make it a bummer or a sad story (at least, not in its promotion).
What you’ll find, just as Barbie has, is that reconnection also boosts new connections as those who reconnect with you more avidly share with those who haven’t connected with you ever before.
Great Brands Are Resonant & Distinctive
Warner Bros. invested approximately $150MM to market the film, slightly exceeding the reported $145MM spent to produce it.
The marketing plan was relatively simple at its core — saturate absolutely every part of the world as much as possible in as many ways as you can. Why? Because it first needed to create and dominate a cultural moment to get people into the movie, and then it needed all of that noise to be there for when the meaning of the brand changed through the film.
Great brands are unique — standing out from competitors to get noticed in an increasingly noisy world.
You may have heard about the fun fact that Barbie literally created a Hot Pink Paint shortage — but its use of a dominant color made it an easy way for the brand to visually saturate the world, and for people to stitch themselves to the movement.
When I said that we all wanted to be wearing pink coming out of the movie, it was because we all wanted to be able to identify with the movement it promised — we wanted others to know we were in on it. We wanted our wives and daughters and sons and mothers to see us in pink to show them our newly felt empathy and understanding.
Backing up from the marketing machine, I want to talk about Mattel’s brand strategy. To ultimately reverse their decline, Mattel embarked on a comprehensive rebranding strategy, using a playbook that proved a springboard to many of the brand’s smash hits.
Richard Dickson, President and Chief Operating Officer of Mattel started by reevaluating the brand’s purpose. “Why do we even exist? What made us great, to begin with?”
For Barbie, it meant reigniting her original brand essence of “inspiring the limitless potential of girls,” a vision Ruth Handler, Barbie’s founder, embraced when she created Barbie.
Everything about the marketing of the movie is based on increasing the volume of this “Girl Power” brand essence. From Pink Pop-Up Shops to Barbie Core, Instagram Filters to Margot Robbie’s Barbie-greatest-hits-fashion press tour, the ultimate success behind Barbie’s brand distinction and resonance is by leaning into all things girl.
You may think that Girl Power would then cut off half of the world’s audience, but it doesn’t. Remember, we five middle-aged men all wanted to wear Girl Power pink when we left the theater.
We often worry so much about trying to appeal to as many people as possible by watering down our distinctiveness, but forget that distinctiveness itself is wildly appealing.
So what can you do? Start with your brand’s essence — your most distinctive brand attribute — and figure out how to make that the noisiest part of your marketing strategy. If you can’t clearly articulate your distinctive brand essence, then you desperately need to solve that. If your essence feels inaccurate or hard to navigate, revisit it.
You can’t resurrect an ailing brand without a North Star.
Great Brands Are True & Human
One of my female friends who went with her husband to the movie told me she felt ‘truly seen’ by the movie.
Besides the fact that one of the guy-friends who saw the movie with me now really wants to learn how to ride a horse, he acknowledges that while he can’t sympathize with the female experience, the Barbie movie helped him empathize with it better than anything else he’d ever seen, read, or experienced.
It’s kind of amazing how much, in the nonprofit space, our success often relies on creating moments of empathy, but how often it’s reduced to surface-level stories, rather than being truly creative or experiential.
Perhaps it’s because empathy often becomes a means to an end and not a vehicle for change within marketing. We, the non-profit marketers & fundraisers, squeeze in empathetic triggers within the limitations of the channels in which we exist (like 1-page letters and 30-second videos). We add a dash of empathy to reductionistic “offers” like meals and bibles that are “urgently needed” before a fiscal year-end. I’ve never been in a conversation that talks about whether we’ve created moments of empathy when we measure the success of our transactional relationship efforts like donor acquisition.
It is rare to see a brand be the force behind truly world-altering moments of genuine empathy and validation at scale. It’s even rarer that someone can do it with humor and grace. But Mattel knows that their ultimate success was not going to come by measuring box-office totals, but by how the Barbie movie has or hasn’t changed the perception of their flagship doll.
To do this, Barbie creates a moment of empathy and validation about the female experience in order to tie its brand to being the voice of the female experience. This then becomes their brand promise that they need to keep. And while a great brand may strive for more than it currently is, it must still be grounded in true and human experiences.
Great brands promise only what they can truly deliver.
One of the most impressive parts of the Barbie movie is how willing Mattel was to air their historic dirty laundry and self-awareness of unrealistic ideals that Barbie often represents. The theater erupted in laughter all the times the narrator of the film called out Mattel’s previous failures and even their casting choices that conflict with the dialog.
I think this is a big part of why many legacy brands are ailing in today’s Western culture. Whether it’s a result of extreme polarization created by modern digital platforms and extreme isolation or an over-reliance on dehumanizing data points that form our marketing decisions, we have forgotten to prioritize how much people need to empathize before they can actualize — and that is REALLY hard to measure.
Seeing an image of a stereotypical homeless person eating a meal without any mention of who they are or what their story is does not produce empathy. It doesn’t reveal the truth about the human experience. It produces projectable revenue-generating guilt and reinforces unhealthy biases within our culture and society. In fact, if you look at the results of many digital fundraising tactics these days, they’ll say you get stronger performance if you take the people out of it altogether and just blast text that alludes to a general people group but doesn’t even bother telling stories of humans or their experiences.
Don’t believe me? Watch this video by the London Interdisciplinary School that demonstrates how AI is being fed from an Internet already heavily populated with Western, white, and male perspectives that create representational harm. Because of the way, AI creates what it sees as "representative" snapshots of the information available to it, it actually concentrates these biases — unwittingly reinforcing them — and further compounds the cycle of misrepresentation. And you can see this in direct-response results too — if our audience's brains are wired to respond to misrepresentations and stereotypes, the results will tell them to lean into it.
At some point, we have to face an ethical decision about our choices in marketing and whether we want to use empathy to drive our long-term brand success or surface-level tropes to give us short-term wins.
The perspective-bending ending of the Barbie movie simply wouldn’t be as powerful if it wasn’t for the journey we were taken on throughout the film. And this is something that many brands are overlooking — how to move from the transactional to the transformational.
Great Brands Are Compelling & Activating
What is activating and compelling about Barbie? A lot.
Pink is everywhere because of that movie. Collaborations with Mattel are showing up all over the place and it’s activating all of those moviegoers who experienced a cultural phenomenon to continue to inject the Barbie brand into more facets of their lives. Why? Because it’s not just about Barbie, it’s about what Barbie stands for.
Great brands compel people to care enough to act and believe their actions will deliver on the brand’s promise.
The movie and the brand make a promise to the viewer that Girl Power has limitless potential, even though roadblocks and challenges may lie ahead.
And you will likely never see a Barbie poster or ad that says “Unlock your limitless potential” because they don’t have to tell you, they showed you, they promised you, and you believed it.
That in a nutshell is what branding is and should always be about.
I love what Lou Paskalis has to say about the Barbie movie’s marketing strategy:
“So many of us in media have spent a large part of our careers trying to isolate which channels drove the most incrementality and delivered down-funnel outcomes in greater proportion than the others. Sophisticated attribution techniques gave rise to multiple disciplines which today often find more people engaged in measuring the return of media than actually leading the media investment and activation strategies.
The reality is that media investment is and always has been an art informed by ever-improving data science. With that in mind, the predilection of so many today is to try to play Jenga with their media investments by eliminating all the channels that don’t pencil out in a flawed direct channel attribution approach constraining the potential of their advertising investment to make the kind of impact on not only consumer demand but indeed the culture as we have witnessed with the marketing of the Barbie movie.
Effective media investment relies on the symbiotic relationship between many well-coordinated tactics across multiple channels and their cumulative ability to build awareness, cultivate interest, and stoke demand. If we can take anything away from the phenomenal success of the Barbie movie, it should be that when you know you’ve got a winning product, bet big and change the game with your media investments and avoid the temptation to over-engineer your campaign, and playing not to lose.”
I agree with Lou. A large part of the Barbie movie’s marketing success was Mattel feeling confident about their winning “product” (the movie) and then going as wide as possible with a lot of strategies that are frankly hard to measure.
Don’t underestimate something as simple as “Pink Everywhere” that can make a distinct brand central to a distinct cultural movement that makes it actionable and compelling.
Good Brands Sometimes Need a Wakeup Call to Become Great Brands
In 2014, Lego™ became the biggest toy company — dethroning Mattel.™ That same year, Elsa became the most popular girl's toy, taking the crown from Barbie. Then, Hasbro, another toy company, won The Walt Disney Company Princess manufacturing contract instead of Mattel which cost Mattel $500 MM.
So in 2018, Mattel decided to do something drastic. Adapt or die.
They decided to adapt and become an Intellectual Property-driven (IP-driven) company and lean heavily into what made them great long ago. Their first film would be Barbie, and interestingly, Amy Schumer was set to direct with Diablo Cody (Juno) as the writer. But the Barbie team didn't like the direction, so the project was up in the air. And then the Barbie movie rights became available, and Margot Robbie's company, LuckyChap Entertainment, grabbed the opportunity. The rest, I suppose, is now history.
Now we’ll see if this strategy holds for the other 40+ IP-driven brands/movies Mattel has in the works. Either way, it’s working really well for the Barbie brand. Does anyone else feel a sequel coming on?
More importantly, what is your wake-up call? Are donors disengaging in droves? Are they aging out while younger people don’t seem to be replacing them? Are you lost trying to innovate and grow in a polarized culture?
If you feel stuck in the “good” brand category (or worse) or feel like you are losing your greatness, here are four questions you can ask to find your way back to powerfully changing the world again.
How is your current brand working to reconnect with your supporters in culturally relevant and truly meaningful ways?
How is your brand’s distinctive essence driving the forefront of marketing in a way that resonates within our cultural moment?
How are you creating room for genuine moments of empathy that speak to our human experience and lead to a promise you can keep?
How is your brand activating and compelling your audiences to take action because they genuinely believe your brand will deliver on your promise?
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
