Mattel’s Barbie Playbook: Replicating Success Across the Company’s Portfolio
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You're listening to a milestone moment in history. On March 9th, 1959, the Barbie doll made its American debut during a commercial break on the Mickey Mouse Club TV show.

It was a daring marketing move by the Mattel toy company and it generated immense interest in the new full-figured doll. In the decades since, Barbie has been a cultural phenomenon as a must-have toy for girls around the world and a lightning rod for controversy.

She and her growing cadre of friends soared to the pinnacle of popularity before stalling in the headwinds of the digital age, only to rise again on the crest of a pop culture tsunami propelled by the movie called simply "Barbie." The 2023 blockbuster put Barbie and Mattel back in the spotlight, but this time the games and the stakes have changed significantly.

Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Elie Ofeck and Ryan Noe to discuss the case Barbie, reviving a cultural icon at Mattel. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you're listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.

Ellie Ofeck explores interactions between R&D and marketing decisions, such as pricing and branding, and he is a repeat customer here on Cold Call. Ellie, welcome back. Wow. Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be here. It's been a while. Great to have you back on the show. Ryan Noe is a doctoral candidate who examines how industries and technologies emerge and evolve. Ryan, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Great to have you both here. Of course, everybody knows Barbie.

And I will say, even though I didn't play with Barbies as a child, my memory of Barbies is trying to extricate them from their packaging on Christmas morning as my two daughters waited to get their hands on the Barbies we had just bought them. So super relatable for people. And of course, with the movie that came out a couple of summers ago where everybody was wearing pink and making it an experience.

I think this is a really fun case. And you give some great insight into the strategy and the decisions that Mattel has to make when dealing with such an iconic toy. Ellie, I'm going to start with you. If you can just tell us what the central issue is in the case and what your cold call is to start the discussion in class. One central issue is a brand that had been popular, indeed introduced in the late 50s, early 60s.

And that popularity has had its moments of, you know, rise and moments of then coming down and being less popular. As you noted, there was a lot of controversy around this particular toy. How do you create that transformation for that particular brand? But it's cast within a broader problem or context of the

company that is also facing a sort of downturn of sorts. And the question then becomes, what is a blueprint or how can this company think about a turnaround strategy? And the Barbie movie and the whole evolution of the Barbie brand in recent years provides a little bit of a context for that transformation. So that's the two central issues that are intertwined in the case. How

How do I start the case and what's the cold call? Once again, there's actually two ways I start this case. The first outer layer of the cold call is a little bit related to the anecdote that you just spoke of with your own family is,

I literally say to students, before we dive into the case issues, let's take a trip down memory lane. Yeah. Did anyone here play with the Barbie doll? And I ask those students to share those moments. And then for those that were silent, I say, what were the things that you played with as a kid? Yeah. So once we get that going and it exposes a lot of interesting things that later we can get back to, I then dive into the case with the

Yeah.

Has Barbie lived up to that philosophy? I love that. And I'm thinking, you know, the average age of our students is roughly 27. So they grew up with a whole bunch of options other than Barbie to play with. So you probably get, you know, some interesting answers in that room. Ryan, let me turn to you. Did you play with Barbie dolls when you were young? Oh, I mean, of course. Barbie, Ken, Skipper.

I had all of them. Yeah, so this case definitely means a lot to me personally. How did you come upon the idea of writing it? Everybody was aware of what was going on, but why did you decide to write a case about it? My PhD dissertation is a study of the digital transformation of the toy industry. Ah, okay. Yes. So I had actually been embedded in this industry for four years doing field work when the movie came out. Mm-hmm.

I find that certain HBS cases are great because the authors have located a hidden gem. And this was not that case. This was splashy and flashy and pink.

And it really demanded to be written about, particularly because, and I think Ellie will agree with this, Barbie is such an icon, an American icon. And so to not have an HBS case about Barbie is a little bit like not having an HBS case about Coca-Cola. And so I think we were both really excited to remedy that oversight and bring Barbie to HBS. Ellie, back to you for a second. The 2023 movie was part of a broader strategic shift in

at Mattel. And I think Barbie, if this statistic is correct, represents about 80% of Mattel's earnings. It's a huge part of their portfolio. What was going on behind the scenes and why was this a smart way for them to introduce kind of a shift in their strategy? Absolutely. When the new CEO took over in 2018, Kreitz, he had come from the entertainment world. He had come from the media world.

His vision for the company was to say, look, we've built up these brands like Barbie, like Hot Wheels, like American Girl Doll. And we are leveraging them in one space, the toy space. But that space is becoming increasingly difficult because of digital transformations and such. That space is becoming difficult because of the way society is thinking about the development of children and what they should be playing with.

But yet again, we have built these brands. They do have some cultural significance in the US as well as abroad. Are we leveraging those sufficiently? Answer to him was no. These are beyond just the physical toys. We can take what we've built here in terms of the

concepts, the ideas and what they mean and bring them into a broader entertainment domain. And that is that strategic shift that he was thinking. These are IPs more than they are just toy brands. And it's appealing, right? Because you can take one concept and

and expose it in multiple places, multiple movies, TV series, games, live shows, anything of that sort. And so there's more opportunity to do that. So that's the broader shift in strategy that the CEO had.

And Barbie, to him and to his other colleagues, represented the first true test case because it had already been out there in the domain of pop culture, if you will. And so the question is, if you can't do it with Barbie, then you can't do it. And so that was the thinking of why Barbie was so important as this litmus test for this new strategy. Yeah.

But Barbie had some baggage, it's fair to say. Barbie has had her share of controversies over the years, and some of those have been widely publicized. So this was a bit of a bold and daring move. What were some of the things that Barbie's encountered over the years, Ryan? Yeah, I mean, where to begin? Probably at the beginning, because really from the earliest days, Barbie was controversial. We have to remember that she came out in 1959, and this was a time when most young girls were playing with baby dolls.

So when Barbie arrived on the scene with her full figure, she raised a lot of eyebrows and it's really only continued from there. Mattel's had a series of missteps along the way, oftentimes, as you know, pretty public. So just as a couple examples, there was babysitter Barbie in the 60s who came with a book titled

titled How to Lose Weight and the instructions in that book read simply don't eat. Then fast forward to the 90s and you have Teen Talk Barbie and Teen Talk Barbie came with a voice box. One of the phrases on the voice box was math class is tough but

But, of course, all of this criticism has always run alongside celebration of Barbie for pushing the envelope, for showing girls that they can be an astronaut, a doctor, a professor, perhaps. So I think for our purposes, what's most fascinating is how Barbie

Mattel has responded to this controversy. One approach would be to run the other way, to hide the checkered past and present a clean front. But of course, that's not what we see them doing. Instead, they've not only learned from these mistakes, but they've actually leveraged them, leaned into this conversation.

We love her, we love her not controversy in a really unique and productive way. Yeah, yeah. Ellie, you were talking about the new CEO's approach to thinking about this. It's actually described in the case as Mattel playbook. Maybe you can describe that for our listeners. Sure. There was a thinking at Mattel, it would seem, that

If they really want to build up their brands and make those brands successful in a sustained way, it has to be more systematic. And that systematic approach was the playbook. And this playbook has four pillars. And I think the most important pillar, or at least the starting point, is the purpose portion, which is to say, what is the purpose of this brand? And leaning, I think, also into Ruth Handler's vision, the way they refined that for Barbie, for example, was that the

The purpose was to inspire the limitless potential in every girl. And it's that purpose then that guides you to be thinking about the second pillar, which is the cultural relevance, which is to say, if we need to inspire limitless potential in every girl, what is the cultural context and how do we leverage the culture such that we can inspire in a way that's relevant? The purpose talks about inspiring and that limitless potential and the fact that it's

every girl emphasis on the every girl and I think that's where this idea came we need to be more diverse in what we represent in this product line and that led to this design led innovation which is the third pillar which is to say what kind of products do we design that are based on what customers are experiencing what they care about what they need

And doing it in a way that the product itself gets designed such that it doesn't overly offend any one group and highly resonates with most groups. And I think that's where you saw them coming out with more skin tones, with dolls that were of different body shape, form, length, height, and so on. And they thought a lot about how to make that design work better.

And then the fourth pillar is the execution pillar, which has a lot to do with, okay, how do you bring that purpose, that cultural relevance, and then this design of the product? How do you actually go to market with these? How do you implement and do it in a way that's creative, novel, and at the same time, highly effective? So that's kind of that playbook where all of these pillars need to come together in order to sort of break through into the commercial world and want customers to embrace you and want you.

I would have loved to have been in the conversations that they were having because this sounds so fraught to me, the whole Project Dawn, which is the redesign of the physical doll. In fact, the movie even sort of plays on this because one of the key things is that Barbie's feet are flat in the movie, right? Ryan, can you talk a little bit about that? Like how do you capably kind of move down this path without somehow offending some group in the process?

Yeah, I mean, I think the easy answer is to say you can't. There will always be critics of Barbie and Barbie will never be fixed and Barbie will never be finished. But I think, as you say, Project Dawn, as an instance, was a real watershed moment for the brand. It really said to consumers that they were listening to criticisms and they were prepared to take risks.

radical steps. And it was radical not just in the cultural sense, but also, you know, introduced complexities about manufacturing and distribution and marketing. And so it was a big step for them. And I think it paid off. Consumers were proud to see that Barbie stepped up and it was on the cover of Time magazine and

I think it was a real indication that the brand was listening. Yeah, yeah. Ellie, just from your experience in studying brands, this has been attempted many times and it doesn't always work. Do you think there's some sort of a key ingredient that brands have to think about when they make this kind of a departure from sort of the core brand that they've grown up with?

Yeah, I think this is a question that many brands ask, especially once they've been around for a while. They have to navigate or weigh the trade-off between we're becoming less relevant. What we have meant to consumers is not cutting it anymore. Mm-hmm.

And at the same time, breaking away from that and going a different route. I think in the case of Barbie, she's always been about this issue of what is the role of women in society? There's always been that aspect. Sometimes it was about the body aspect of it, but other times it was about what can women accomplish and achieve.

Where they sort of gravitated towards is a place where at the moment, or at least in society, the question was, how do you balance that tension between, on the one hand,

being a supporter of feminism and thinking about women empowerment and equal rights for women, but at the same time, not losing the femininity. That is, it's okay to be feminine. It's a tension. And the movie embraces that tension and puts it out full-fledged. And I think it is somewhat of a departure, but it's not...

to say that Barbie itself had not had an angle or had not been viewed by society as having something to say about women's role in society. It's just that they were a little more pointed and embraced what was going on in the culture at the moment. And I think that was the smart piece of what they did. Yeah. Is this part of the struggle or the challenge maybe of moving from a product-centered brand to an IP-focused brand?

To an extent, at least in the way it was brought out. Because before that, you had the doll itself. And yes, I can represent different skin tones and hairstyles. And I can bring out disabilities in the toy as a physical toy. Bringing it out this way in a movie is a completely different form of expression. And that is more along the lines of the IP.

Ryan, back to you for a second. I'm just wondering, you know, as we talk about trying to be relevant and trying to respond to what's happening in the current culture, how did Mattel's efforts in this space affect the brand's cultural relevance and public perceptions overall? Because, I mean, it continues to be a very complex and challenging problem for Barbie, particularly in the past decade as culture evolves more quickly. And I think for our purposes, again, what's interesting is that there's this tendency to celebrate the big wins

win of the movie. But really, this was the culmination of...

many hands working over many years. So it was Project Dawn, it was the Fashionistas line, and all of these efforts focused on thinking about, okay, in today's setting, who is Barbie and who is Mattel? Who should Barbie be and can she be for everyone? There's a statistic that we have in the case that by 2023, Barbie was released in 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles, and nine body types. So that's a lot of

diversity and the movie is really just the last link in that chain of trying to rethink who Barbie can be. Yeah, obviously the movie itself created its own set of controversies. It wasn't geared towards children. It was geared towards more of an adult audience. Kind of handing all of this over to the director whose name was Greta Gerwig. That was a

big step and a big leap of faith for Mattel. What are the implications of something like that? How do you think about that as a brand owner of literally handing your brand over to somebody who's never managed it before? Right. Yeah. That was one of the more interesting aspects here, but yet one of the more, I would say, calculated risks that they took. So the deal is this, you want to be culturally relevant. You want to be credible. It's very hard to do that if

The perception is that you have engineered things, that you have tried to control things. They needed to be genuine. They needed to be authentic. This needed to come from voices that were living this type of controversy. And I think Greta Gerwig was that credible, authentic voice. And if they had tried to control her too much, A, she may not have been willing to play along. B, it would not have had, I believe...

the same level of success in the sense that she knew the nuances of this world she knew how to bring those nuances out as the unique director and then her partner who helped with the screenplay the mattel people knew that they themselves could not come up with a script that would be it would be hard for them that would be perceived as genuine so they needed to hand it over

to somebody that would be authentic, genuine. And in Greta Gerwig and in Margot Robbie, they had the two partners for which that was a calculated risk to do this with. Yes, it's a leap of faith. Yes, it's a risk. Yes, you are basically handing it over to another entity and you're going to say,

It's not like we'll go with everything they propose or that we don't have a final veto, but we're going to by and large accept what they give us. And that's what they did. Yeah. And sort of an interesting sidebar to all of that was that Margot Robbie negotiated an amazing deal for herself in this. So she's sort of a living example of women empowerment in the context of the film. The case talks about Barbie Corps. Ryan, I'm wondering if you can describe what Barbie Corps is.

What is Barbie Corps not? Barbie Corps is... I never heard the term before the case. Oh, okay. So it was really just this atmosphere of the summer of 2023 where everywhere you looked, everything was pink. Everything was Barbie from the fashion to the interior design to the food, everything, red carpet, outfits. And so it really was just this sense like it was omnipresent everywhere you looked. Yeah.

Was that just a marketing thing or did that just sort of take on a life of its own? I mean, did Mattel set out with the intent of saying we're going to create this movement or did people sort of take ownership of it at some level? It's an interesting question and I think it's kind of a little bit of both in the sense that

call it the genius from a marketing standpoint of what Mattel had done was to say, look, we want to be omnipresent. We want to be embedded in culture because cultural relevance is one of the pillars. How do you do that? One way to do that is if you get other partners that are part of people's experiences, like what they wear, like what they eat, like what they listen to and so on.

And you get those partners to say, you know what? We want to co-create with you. So you tell them you have license to create a product that's relevant in your world. Let's say it's a piece of clothing. Let's say it's if you're Airbnb, it's a rental that looks like the Barbie house. And if it's retailer, then it's anything that they can put in their stores that has that element. On the one hand, you get these partners to say, let's be part of this. We will co-create. We also have skin in the game. We want this to succeed.

At the same time, it creates a 360 where the consumer is engulfed everywhere they go. They see this pink level or a Barbie related theme. And then people start talking about it. People want to embrace it and people want to be part of it. The only challenge here is that you run the risk of

it's gonna be a fad. So it's a moment rather than a movement in some sense. And so they definitely created the moment. The moment was big, everybody embraced the moment. And in the aftermath of the movie, one would have to see, did this live up to sustained momentum?

Yeah. Again, it's part of letting go of brand control. I think the case mentions that Burger King did like a pink sauce, which sounds kind of gross to me. But it's how they interpreted the Barbie Corps movement, right? Ryan, how far should they push this? There's risk involved in all of the things that they're doing. But they want to be relevant. That's one of their pillars. But how far is too far? Yeah, it's a great question. And also to pick up on something Ellie mentioned, it was a very unique –

moment in time, even just socially. So casting our minds back, this was right when COVID lockdowns were ending. There was a lot of political turmoil and protests and fires

about the future. Part of what Ellie is speaking to is there was this yearning for something that was social and colorful and somewhat nostalgic, but also somewhat iconoclastic. To your question, Brian, it's a question about was this lightning in a bottle that was released or is this something that you can keep repeating? So it's a real challenge for them going forward about how

How far can you push this sort of Barbie branding without it coming tired or trite or overplayed? And how much should you just accept that you met the cultural moment head on and you did something superlative and maybe now it's the time that you need to start thinking about what's next? Yeah, that's a great point. Ellie, brand marketers love to talk about Maslow's hierarchy. It's one of those things that shows up in all these podcasts.

branding books. You can't get away from it. But the case does talk about it. And I know Mattel thought about it. Can you talk about where Barbie sits in Maslow's hierarchy today versus where she may have been, you know, 20 or 30 years ago? Yeah, it's very interesting. So, I mean, the question is, you know, with Maslow's hierarchy and layering on top of that, the brand hierarchy, there is this idea of, you know, what need is it satisfying? Is it a basic need? Probably

probably not a basic need. Is it the need for security? Probably not. But it does start going up on that Maslow hierarchy and their goal has always been for the Barbie brand and for what it means to kids when they play with it to be aspirational and to reach the hierarchy where it's about who you are, who you want to be, your identity and what it says about you. Going back to even our first part of the discussion,

because society changes, because the culture changes, who I want to be, how I interpret who I want to be. If your brand doesn't evolve with that, you're going to lose out. You're going to get stale. And so I think they had a fork in the road where they said, if we don't shift, if we don't, you know, figure out what it is that we need to tap into in order to

get into people's higher levels of what we satisfy for them in the hierarchy, we're going to become irrelevant and we're going to lose out. And they were already starting to see that because kids play with Barbie, but it's the parents that make the decisions. And so if the parents

are not seeing this as a brand and a toy that they want their kids to be associated with it. Tough luck. And so that's where the movie was then targeted at adults. They wanted to win back those millennials that were sort of pushing aside the whole concept of Barbie and they wanted them to sort of reignite that. To your point, I think yes.

that needed to change on the Maslow hierarchy or at least what it meant or what it was aspiring to be. And I think the movie was in an attempt to do that. That's a good lead into the next question I have, which is another new word that I learned was kidult. Kidult. Kidult.

I don't – I'm still not exactly sure what kidult means. But maybe, Ryan, you can explain that to us because back to what we were discussing just a moment ago about how far do you push this? How far do you go to be relevant? There's been thinking about whether or not Barbie breaks out of her gender stereotype, for instance. I mean is that pushing it too far? So first on kidult.

So what we have with Cadult, and this is a new thing within the industry, it's obviously a portmanteau of kid and adult. So it's really when you're targeting more adult collectors rather than children. But also on the question of, you know, breaking out of the gendered box, this is a big question that the industry as a whole is facing and has for the past decade. But I'm excited to report that just a couple of weeks ago, Mattel released a new Ken doll in the likeness of LeBron James.

Really? Yes. And my understanding is this is the first time they've ever released a Ken doll in the likeness of a professional athlete. And as you can imagine, the lines were out the door. I think the doll is already totally sold out. And so it's an early signal that Mattel is taking steps to break out, to think about boys and also adult collectors as consumers. Something that's always fascinating me is that a Ken doll is for girls, but a Ken action figure...

Right. You've become an action figure. All of a sudden, it's for boys. And so I think that what Mattel is trying to do is perhaps rethink and break down some of these seemingly artificial barriers. Yeah. So going back to you, Ellie, you mentioned earlier the Hot Wheels line, which is another important line for Mattel. They also have Polly Pocket. They've got a number of very popular toy lines.

Are they going to follow the same sort of MO? Do those four pillars apply to all of their product lines? Yes, I think that is the sort of million-dollar question here, and I think one where it really puts this strategy to the test.

Can you really turn all of the other toy brands that Mattel has into quote unquote IPs and port them into other segments and to other media entertainment products? And so far it's not been as easy or as simple as I think Mattel would have liked. And if you take their second best brand Hot Wheels in terms of sales, you know, I think there's more Hot Wheel cars in the world than there are physical cars in the world. Wow.

I think my grandson has most of them. Very possible. And they are relevant culturally in the sense that, you know, they come out with new models. So they'll have a Tesla Model S. You know, if there's new cars that are gaining traction, they'll come out with those models too. And they're releasing this year a whole series around the Formula One racing cars. So that's going to

be a big hit, I'm expecting. So they're relevant in the culture in the sense that they're trying to make sure that they bring in everything that in vehicles is part of what people care about and are excited by. But I don't think that Hot Wheels in and of itself is a societal message baked into it. And so if they are thinking of turning that into an IP,

It would not be around a tension in society that has to be resolved through the movie. No, no. They'd have to think a little more creatively around what else in society or in culture that they can link to vehicles can they bring out. And it doesn't have to be something so controversial like with Barbie in terms of what is the role of women in society and how are men perceived and what is patriarchy and all of that. They'll have to find something else. And that's not so easy to do. So we'll see.

If they're able to pick up on where they left off with the Barbie movie and port that into other franchises. And I think they'll have to evolve what cultural relevance means to not be just about societal tensions, but it's yet to be seen. Yeah, that's a great end point. And maybe better to stay away from societal tensions because I can—

Especially in today's reality. Yeah, it can get you in trouble, can't it? This has been a great conversation like I knew it would be. I've been looking forward to this one for a while. I've got one question left for each of you, and I'll start with you, Ryan, which is that if we look five years into the future, how relevant will Barbie be? How will Mattel know if they've been able to succeed in sustaining this movement that they started?

Yeah, I think at this point in time, a big question that I'm sure they are asking themselves is, how can we really start to lead and not to follow? And I think...

The Barbie movie wasn't the first movie based on a toy property. Many said it was a long time coming. To think really expansively about what can Barbie be beyond just a doll and what can Mattel be beyond just a toy maker. When you start thinking expansively like that, your metrics can't just be about toy sales anymore. You need to be thinking about permeation in society and frequency of conversation and sometimes positive, sometimes negative things.

But I think five years from now, we won't just be talking about Barbie dolls. We'll be talking about the brand as something more expansive than that. I love that. And maybe there'll be a bee case that we'll be discussing on cold call five years from now. You don't know, right? Yeah.

Ellie, I'm going to give you the final word in this, which is quite simply, if you want our listeners to remember one thing about the Barbie case, what would it be? If I wanted them to remember one thing would be something along the lines of you have to walk that line between being controversial on the one hand and then leaning into that and turning it into something positive. And I think that they were able to do that in a way that's so unique and

Yes, there were the missteps that we discussed on earlier. And so there was a lot of critique. But the line I love in the marketing of the movie is the line where the CMO says, if you love Barbie or if you hate Barbie, this movie is for you. Can you take something like that where there's attack

on the one hand, there's love on the other hand. You can turn it into something creative and build on that. And that's something we want businesses to do in general. Look, things are not always going to go well. How do you learn from the critique, from the feedback, from what you're getting and turn that into something that you can then build upon even further and be a success on its own? I think that kind of

thinking and the way they navigated that was very unique and in some sense inspiring and a lesson that a lot of companies can take. Yeah, that's a great final thought. And I'm looking forward to the Ken movie. I predict there'll be a Ken movie coming out sometime soon. You can feel the Kennergy. Excellent. Ryan, Ellie, thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having us. Hey, it was a lot of fun. Thank you. If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we'd be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, email us at coldcall at hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you've been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.