Barbie is a brand that keeps changing with the times – 07/13/2023 – Market

Those born in 1959 sometimes reflect on our own mortality. “Have you ever thought about dying?” Barbie asks her doll friends as they dance happily in the upcoming comedy film co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig. The stylus scratches, the music stops and they stare blankly: clearly not.

So Stereotypical Barbie (name of the character played by Margot Robbie) has to leave Barbie Land and explore her existential doubts in the Real World. “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever,” she hears from a character named Ruth, presumably based on Ruth Handler, the inventor of the world’s most popular doll and co-founder of Mattel, its owner.

That’s the comforting moral of the movie “Barbie,” set to be a blockbuster this summer, and there’s some truth to it. Barbie, the trademark, is 64 years old and showing no signs of expiring, despite having a mid-life crisis a decade ago. It’s the latest revival of a brand that felt outdated for much of its existence, but remains powerful enough to outrun rivals.

“We haven’t played with Barbie since we were about five,” a dismissive bunch of teenagers inform Robbie. Bratz, Disney Princess and Elsa (Frozen) dolls have been more fashionable periodically, and Barbies have been constantly updated over the years with different hair styles, body shapes and skin tones. But what Mattel calls the “original Barbie” is the icon: who else?

Longevity is the ultimate test of a brand: not whether it stays in fashion all the time, but whether it manages to keep resurfacing. Much is down to adaptability. There will be spin-offs and extensions, but there must be a quality that allows the original to endure: the sweet bubble for Coca-Cola, masculine care for Gillette, and feminine aspiration for the first adult doll for children.

Barbie has the inherent appeal that movie studios depend on today, though Gerwig had to build a narrative for her, opting for a meta-comedy in which Will Ferrell plays a bombastic Mattel chief executive. It’s a classic “kids-grown-up” brand with enough fame to attract generations of risk-averse moviegoers to debut this month.

Adaptation of brands is known as IP cinema (intellectual property) and has spread from the “Transformers” movies based on Hasbro toys to Disney’s Marvel franchise. This dismays the authors of the golden (or imaginary) days of cinema: Martin Scorsese, director of “Taxi Driver” and “Goodfellas”, called it “brutal and inhospitable for art”.

Hollywood certainly has a cynical heart: Barbie was banned this week from debuting in Vietnam for including on a map the “line of nine dashes” that China uses to claim sovereignty over territories in the South China Sea. It may have been an oversight, but I doubt it: Both Mattel and Barbie studio Warner Bros. want to please Chinese consumers.

Cinematic creativity is not dead, however. It simply has to function within tight confines, like Barbie’s pantone pink Dreamhouse, in which Gerwig heaps jokes that would please a critical theorist. Is your Barbie really less inventive than the fairytale universe constructed by Wes Anderson, whom Scorsese admires in movies like “Asteroid City”?

Mattel is as enthusiastic an explorer as any studio for its brands, which include Hot Wheels, American Girl and Barney. In addition to Barbie, it is developing 14 other live-action film spin-offs and frequently takes legal action to protect its intellectual property, with mixed results. In 2002, he lost a well-known trademark claim for the pop song “Barbie Girl” by the band Aqua, which appears on the “Barbie” soundtrack.

But Barbie’s remarkable resilience stems less from the rigorous enforcement of intellectual property than from the flexibility of Handler’s invention. She took the idea for an adult doll from a sassy German creation called Lilli, adapting it for the girls she saw playing pretend with paper cutouts. They wanted a toy to help them imagine themselves as adults, and she gave them the postwar ideal.

The original Barbie, with her impossibly slim waist, arched feet and housewife aspirations, soon dated: She ceded popularity 20 years ago to the sassier, more shapely Bratz dolls (which Mattel sued). But Mattel bounced back: It now has several Barbies with many professions, including a Naomi Osaka doll, tennis racquet and all.

The essence of Barbie is in her spirit, not her appearance, which brings longevity. “At the core of the brand is the idea of ​​inspiring girls and letting them dream, create and make believe. You can change the dolls, but the appeal doesn’t change,” says Chloe Preece, associate professor of marketing at ESCP business school.

This doll is tough enough to withstand ridicule. No one “likes to be the butt of a joke, not even a trademark,” the US Supreme Court observed last month. But Mattel allowed Gerwig and his co-writer Noah Baumbach to satirize (albeit affectionately) the company and its flagship brand. You need to be confident in your property to allow the two of you to play with it.

Barbie is the story of a perky doll plunging into “an all-out existential crisis,” but the trademarks are endlessly renewable. Until now, Barbie too.

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}