-Introduction
-Thesis: Mattel used various methods to gain insight into what their customers wanted from Barbie as their wants and needs changed through new social movements, ideas, and increasing competition.
-Tracing the changes through different eras
- The beginning: 1950’s
-Feminist Movement
- Civil Rights Movement
- Current time
-Gaining insights: Barbie's beginnings
-Ruth Handler saw her daughter liked giving her dolls adult roles but most dolls for infants so found a gap in the market
- Found a German doll that represented what she wanted to produceàgave it to her daughter for a test
-The Conservative 50’s
-Types of insights gained
-Very conservative society but found women had the urge to be empowered
-Barbie was a working woman but still very fashionable and alluring to men
- Faced problems that society wasn’t ready for this
-Too promiscuous
- Had breasts and sexy eyes (before dolls had no womanly form)
- Barbie had a job (empowered)
-First toy with marketing strategy based mostly in TV
- Feminist Movement
-Barbie had many new occupations (empowered women)
- Girls and their mothers had the need to have a role model of a strong woman who could make a living for herself
-Body shape changed
-Minority’s fight for equality and its effect
- Realized they had to fulfill a need from the minority community
-Introduce a black and Hispanic Barbie
-Current time:
-Competing with sexier Bratz Dolls
-Keep their image? Or grow from the success of these edgier dolls
-They won’t the lawsuit so what are they going to do next?
-Competing with increasing types of toys and electronic toys
-Dolls with no special features so no longer catching the attention of customers
-Harder to capture the imagination of this generation
- How try to fix this?
- Add new electronic/web based accessories to keep up with the times
-Barbie Girl’s virtual world
-Video/Computer games
-Barbie accessories and dolls related to Barbie movies
-Conclusion
-Mattel has changed Barbie’s marketing strategy throughout the times to reach the customers of new generations
-What I have learned from this study?
- Impact of social movement on brand strategy
-Mistakes a company can make in its research of customers needs
-Application to customer insights
- The importance of understanding the every-changing needs and wants of a customer base in order to keep a brand strong for more than 50 years
-Questions
- Is it geared enough towards gaining insights—I’m afraid that it is just about their marketing strategy
- I’m worried that I won’t be able to find enough sources on this. There was one book at the library that looked good but that was about it. Do you know of anyplace I can look?
-Do you think this set up is okay? I just think there were so many changes and additions to Barbie over the past 50 years so I didn’t know how to categorize these changes
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Rachel - This is looking good to me. It's a little difficult to read your outline without the formatting, but I understand that is a problem trying to copy something like that into Blogger. I definitely see elements of gaining insights in your outline. The question you should keep asking yourself (and essentially answering in the paper) is... In what ways are their marketing strategy based on customer insights or are there areas of their marketing strategy that have missed the boat, so to speak, because they have failed to capture or see key insights (thinking about how blind-sided they seemed to be by the Bratz dolls). Be sure that you also present the experiences that Barbie creates for young customers - what is it that they value that Barbie provides and be very explicit about that. I think that following the history of Barbie the way you have presented it makes sense for a flow of the paper. The only other way I can think of is to organize it just by topics of interests (female empowerment, body issues or over-idealizing the female form, etc.). The place I looked was Google Scholar and, using the search term 'barbie doll,' I found a few articles that looked interesting. Let me know if you are still having trouble and you can come by my office so we can search together. Let me know (in-person) if you have other questions or concerns.
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