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Barbie Doll Campaign Critique

Barbie is taking a step towards developing a more inclusive brand and creating an equal society for children. The company has launched a new advertisement that features influential women of color and disabilities. The Barbie campaign was conceptualized by the Los Angeles advertising agency, BBH. The Mattel-owned brand, Barbie, launched the global campaign on 3rd May 2021. The one-minute advertisement themed ‘A Doll Can Help Change The World’ features numerous children, including both boys and girls, playing with dolls. The dolls range from white Barbie dolls to colored dolls. The children are seen putting their dolls to sleep, reading them books, putting them to bed and even kissing them goodnight. After reading the dolls a novel, the boy asks if they have questions. Afterwards, the children are seen feeding their pets and welcoming their guests into their homes. The advertisement also features a disabled child combing her doll’s hair, a boy pretending to feed his doll and a girl pretending to swim with her mermaid dolls in the bathtub.

Ad campaign link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=862sbukhpesGoals

The Barbie doll campaign aims to convey the message that allowing children to play with dolls has emotional benefits. The campaign that was launched early last year is hell-bent on showing that dolls can help change the world to become a better place. The campaign focuses on how dolls help nurture specific traits of empathy, patience, generosity, and leadership in children. Through the simple tasks that children do, such as washing, and reading to their dolls, children are bound to become better individuals as they grow up. Barbie dolls are important in early childhood development as they help children become more empathetic and generous.

Target

The Barbie Doll campaign themed ‘A Doll Can Help Change the World’ was initiated following a recent study at Cardiff University. Barbie carried out the study showed that allowing children to play with dolls helps build their social information processing skills. The campaign targets young children between the age of four and eight. The study carried out by Barbie carried on for 18 months. A team was tasked with monitoring the brain activities of 33 children between four and eight years while they played with dolls versus with tablets.

Insight

By the end of 2015, Barbie had registered ten quarters in sales decline. The Barbie doll has been viewed as a symbol of the destructive body expectations that girls deal with in current society. Notably, the Barbie doll has become the subject of wide criticism for its lack of diversity and heteronormativity. Mattel came up with an idea to change this negative perception as it was affecting the company’s sales. To do this, Mattel launched a chain of campaigns that focused on inclusivity and empowerment. They even undertook changing the body shapes of their Barbie dolls. Barbies’ 2015 campaign named ‘Imagine the Possibilities’ became fundamental in repositioning the company as a doll which helped girls recognize their potential (“Campaign Of The Week: A Doll Can Help Change The World”). As a result, Mattel was successful in transforming Barbie into a worthwhile role model that reflects the 21st century. Following a change in communications, Barbie registered enormous growth by 2016. Some of the more conservative countries seemed less emphatic about the modernization of Barbie dolls. Despite this, there is no doubt that the doll sector was headed in a progressive direction. In 2019, South America’s Hasbro launched a sweet yet straightforward advertisement showing children, and particularly boys playing with dolls and the emotional advantages of the same. The recent products that Barbie has developed features a variety of gender-neutral models, varied body sizes and differently-abled dolls. Today, toy representation has transformed from the usual nice-to-have form to a more relatable and expected norm and we have Mattel to thank for paving the way.

Coming up with engaging strategies to communicate the benefits of products is a common problem for many brands. In the past, we have encountered brands that go uncommon places to deliver messages in interesting and fresh ways. In this case, Mattel repackaged the notion that playing with Barbies impacts children’s well-being positively. The Mattel Barbie campaign came at a time when parents were nervous concerning the emotional impact that the curfews and lockdown had on children.

Big Idea

Mattel’s Barbie campaign ‘A Doll Can Help Change the World’, is the biggest advertisement campaign that the company has ventured into in five years. The big idea is that making these changes on the design and appearance of dolls was important because it impacts children’s ability to show empathy and other traits such as generosity. Although Mattel is yet to release the exact figures, Kantar estimates that the company has doubled its year-on-year spending on advertisements in 2021 and it spent $53 million on brand advertising in 2020. The first quarter of 2021 saw Barbie sales rise 87% compared to 2020 and the campaign is a clear indication to keep the momentum going.

Results

The ‘A Doll Can Help Change the World’ campaign started with research that compared brain activity of children that played with tablets versus dolls. The 33 child participants were between the age of four and eight. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Sarah Gerson, the results of the study were rather impressive. Dr. Gerson reported that they noted that the posterior superior temporal sulcus being more active in children as they played with dolls. This is an indication that allowing children to play with dolls helps them rehearse some social skills that they will need later in life. Noteworthy, these findings are probably country agnostic since the said region of the brain has been found to play similar roles in supporting social processing and empathy across six continents. The results of the study found that playing with dolls activates the section of the brain related to empathy. Additionally, the study showed that playing with dolls affects how children interact with other people in future. The explanation is that it is only in childhood that people tend to build castles of imagination because they tend to be living in their own world. If the child castle has diverse people of all shapes, colors and sizes, the child is likely to grow to becoming more empathetic towards the people they will meet in the future.

Key Activations

For a long time, Barbie dolls used to be blonde which satisfied ideal beauty standards and sold a picture of white supremacy. Consumers viewed the brand as shallow and vapid as it promoted a negative body image, lacked Barbie diversity and perceived sexism (Sharma, 1). The first Barbie doll hit the shelves in 1959. It had perfect makeup, wore striped swimming attire, a petite figure, and a blond ponytail. In 1960, it was hard dark air and got a job. In 1969, Mattel made its first colored Barbie. In 1986, the Barbie landed on the moon. It donned a Kimono and stepped out of America in 2003. The first curvy doll was introduced in 2016 and a year later, the first doll with a hijab came. Since the Company’s makeover in 2015, the brand has introduced a variety of products called Barbie Fashionista doll, that includes 24 dolls that have eight shades of skin tone and a variety of curly hair options. Since then, the company has been making a conscious effort to develop more inclusive products.

Works Cited

“Campaign Of The Week: A Doll Can Help Change The World”. Contagious, 2021, https://www.contagious.com/news-and-views/barbie-says-dolls-boost-empathy-in-year-long-global-campaign.

Sharma, Karuna. “Barbie’S Global Campaign Reminds Us How Kids Playing With Dolls Can Aid In Developing Empathy And Generosity At An Early Age”. Business Insider, 2022, https://www.businessinsider.in/advertising/brands/article/barbies-global-campaign-reminds-us-how-kids-playing-with-dolls-can-aid-in-developing-empahttps://www.businessinsider.in/advertising/brands/article/barbies-global-campaign-reminds-us-how-kids-playing-with-dolls-can-aid-in-developing-empathy-and-generosity-at-an-early-age/articleshow/82405523.cmsthy-and-generosity-at-an-early-age/articleshow/82405523.cms.