New! Social Media Barbie…

Interesting article in this week’s Fortune, with Lex Luthor on the cover.

It seems that Barbie, now pushing 50, has fallen on hard times:

Barbie’s fall from grace has been spectacular. After being the top-selling fashion doll for most of the past half-century, she fell victim to changing tastes and to competition, most notably from Bratz, a line of edgier, more ethnically diverse dolls produced by MGA Entertainment.

No surprise there, really. What caught my interest in the piece was this:

[Brand Manager Richard] Dickson worked with decorator Jonathan Adler to stage a real-life Barbie dream house in Malibu and had designers including Diane von Furstenberg create life-size Barbie apparel for Fashion Week. To pay for it he cut back on traditional 30-second TV spots — a hard sell to Mattel’s board. “Let’s just say there was a lot of pushback,” he says.

Right. So it turns out Ye Olde Media – about as long in the tooth as Barbie herself – gave way in the strategy of the brand’s new, 41-year old steward to more tangible efforts at making the brand more relevant to a new audience. Tangible “content” trumped reflexive interruption marketing, you might say. And the Powers That Be within Mattel winced.

So… did it work?

His strategy seems to be working. Barbie’s U.S. sales jumped 18% in the most recent quarter, the biggest gain in nearly three years. McGowan expects U.S. sales to total $370 million this year, posting their first significant increase since 2006. “Barbie is on a tear,” says Gerald Storch, CEO of Toys “R” Us, noting that sales are up “significantly” over last year.

Right.

I’ve said in earlier posts that sometimes brands leverage social media not by creating facebook pages, but simply by doing something worth talking about. I really see this through that lens… while it’s not the kind of social media case study most people talk about, it does represent the emergence of a content-based strategy made more potent by people’s ability to communicate with each other.

You might say this is not really new, and you’d be right. In a way it’s the oldest story in Hollywood. Aging, iconic, once-beautiful starlet loses her luster, becomes less relevant as tastes change, hires a publicist and starts to behaving in ways worth talking about.

Expect the homemade sex tape any day now.

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Tagged as: Barbie, Dolls, Fashion doll, Lex Luthor, Mattel, MGA Entertainment, US