Guest Post: Ishani Nath on the Barbie Marketing Blitz—and Why It May Not Be as Feminist as It Seems
By Ishani nath
Image: instagram.com/barbiethemovie
This week’s newsletter is a guest post from freelance writer, editor and TV junkie Ishani Nath, whose bylines can be found in Maclean's, Chatelaine, Best Health, CBC, The Juggernaut, FLARE (RIP) and more. She has also appeared as a pop culture commentator on TV, radio and several podcasts.
I am—and always have been—easily influenced by entertainment.
As a kid, that meant I needed whatever Polly Pocket or plush toy child actors were screaming about on YTV. As an adult, it means that if you show me enough Instagram ads, I will be purchasing your random Etsy products. As Ariana Grande sang, “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it”—it’s just math. And right now, that means my cart is full of items that are hot pink.
Over the past few months, the entire world has turned Pantone 219 C, better known as Barbie Pink, in the lead up to the highly-anticipated July 21 release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Against the odds, Barbie has become this summer’s “it” girl, and every brand wants a piece. And frankly, the brand’s team is putting in the work.
Mattel, the makers of the Barbie doll, reportedly garnered a whopping 100 partnerships for their iconic doll brand. Airbnb listed Barbie’s Malibu DreamHouse. Shay Mitchell’s cult favourite luggage brand Beis released a Barbie collection. There are roller skates, nail polish lines, fashion collections, pool floats, candles, glassware, and even a toothbrush—all in Barbie’s signature shade.
With a $100 million budget and massive marketing push, Mattel is targeting everyone. “We're going after a broad audience and really trying to ensure that we are everywhere,” Lisa McKnight, executive VP and global head of Barbie and dolls at Mattel, told AdAge. It seems like everyone is buying in, but intense fervour around new Barbie products, from drinks to dog hats, has increasingly felt… icky, especially for a film that reportedly critiques corporate feminism. Are we just putting rose-coloured glasses on mass consumerism or is this necessary cost of breaking into the box office big leagues? Turns out, kinda sorta both. Hear me out.
Barbie’s marketing strategy leans heavily on millennial-friendly feminism
Full disclosure, I have not seen the film yet and I will be dressing up in a hot pink outfit today to attend an opening-day screening. Like I said, I’m easily influenced by entertainment—and the release of this film has become an event the likes of which we have not had in years. With a stacked A-list cast, the PG-13 film follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) as she has an existential crisis and starts to question her identity and her own mortality (i.e. a plot plucked right from the millennials’ angsty Notes apps). Oh, and Ken (Ryan Gosling) is there too.
Barbie is the first of 14 movies that Mattel hopes to produce based on its various toys. Daniel Kaluuya is signed on for a version of Barney, Tom Hanks will be starring as action figure and astronaut Major Matt Mason, Lena Dunham is producing Polly Pocket, and there’s buzz about a horror-adjacent film about the magic eight ball and a ‘gritty’ Hot Wheels movie. Welcome to the new MCU.
Mattel executives have said that the move into movies is intended to expand their business “outside of the toy aisle” and grow brand awareness, which is why Barbie’s marketing is actively targeting all women, from “little girls all the way through grandmas, or what we call ‘glam-mas’,” Mattel president and COO Richard Dickson told WSJ.
In some ways this is not surprising; girls and women have always been the core demographic for Barbie, a toy that was initially created in 1959 by Ruth Handler and modelled after a German gag-gift escort doll. As kids, many of us had—or wanted—Barbies. Now the girls that once played with these dolls are women with disposable incomes, able to purchase (or pass over) them for the children in their lives, depending on their own perspective on Barbie’s cultural prominence and/or how nostalgic they feel about her.
“Barbie was created and marketed as a toy of special personal importance to young girls—as a prototype for adulthood, a projection of a future life,” wrote Kelly Gillblom and Thomas Buckley in Bloomberg. “Introduced at a moment in history when girls lacked real-world examples of high-powered women, Barbie, with her bombshell looks and high-flying jobs, filled a cultural vacuum.” As several reports have pointed out, Barbie was an executive career girl by 1963 when women rarely held those roles in real life, an astronaut 13 years before NASA accepted its first female astronaut, and a presidential candidate by 1992. (While this was definitely progressive for the time, it’s important to note that these Barbies were thin, white and adhered to a stereotypical Western beauty standard, because of course they were.)
“Our brand represents female empowerment,” Dickson told Time in 2016. “It’s about choices. Barbie had careers at a time when women were restricted to being just housewives. Ironically, our critics are the very people who should embrace us.”
The Gerwig-helmed movie marks the latest pivot in the toy company’s lengthy battle to break out of its own moulds in order to fit the shifting demands of modern consumers. Sixteen inch waists and feet built for high heels are out. Barbies of different sizes, shapes, abilities and races are in. The film is reportedly surprisingly self-deprecating and self-aware despite being, essentially, a lengthy piece of custom content that was partially funded by Mattel. (Gerwig only agreed to do the project if she had minimal input from their team, a boundary she stuck to. Execs reportedly visited the set and tried to tone down a few jokes, but Gerwig largely refused.)
But Barbie’s feminist cred is… complicated. And so is the rampant consumerism at play here
Still, it’s fascinating that the main audience for Barbie—primarily women under 35, and secondarily women 35 to 49—have been so receptive to Barbie’s marketing, because for the majority of this audience, the doll is both nostalgic and controversial. Second-wave feminists called out the figurine for having unrealstic proportions (which she does; what’s more studies indicate that young girls who played with Barbies had lower self esteem and poorer body image than those who did not) and being overly sexual (she was modelled on a novelty toy marketed to men). As The New Yorker reported, by the 1970s “I am not a Barbie doll” could be heard at women’s-rights protests. By the 1990s, the doll was largely considered unfeminist—and yet, she has now somehow been rebranded as a feminist icon.
With all of this in mind, the movie’s marketing vibe feels a lot like getting DMed by that girl who was fun and popular in middle school but also kinda made you feel like shit. We’ve both changed over the years; maybe things will be different this time? After all, this Barbie promises to be relevant, inclusive and feminist.
And listen, there’s a lot to be said for the fact that Barbie is breaking barriers in a movie industry that heavily skews to male audiences. The movie is helmed by a female director and it’s an original story—not another remake!!!—that centres the thoughts and experiences of women. These are rarities at the box office, especially when it comes to big budget movies. Women make up approximately half of moviegoers, outnumbering men in the coveted 15-24 age group, but as Bloomberg noted, barely any big-budget films specifically target them. As financial writers Girls That Invest pointed out on Twitter, if Barbie performs as it is expected to, it is on track to be the biggest domestic opening for a solo female director in history.
It’s freaking awesome to see an original script that is geared at women get the hype and buzz that has become standard for Marvel movies. At the same time, it’s a reminder that Mattel is a corporation that is strategically profiting off feminism—which is inherently unfeminist. As Huck magazine noted, when women continue to make less than men, suggesting that spending money equals female empowerment is simply not it. Plus there’s a disproportionate number of women being exploited in the fast fashion industry that’s pumping out these Barbie-themed shirts, hats and dresses for Forever 21, Boohoo, Gap and more. Meanwhile, less than 0.1 percent of Mattel’s profits are earmarked for initiatives to help address gender-based inequity, per the Guardian.
The brand has partnered with some diverse businesses, like Swoon, a zero-sugar drink company founded by Cristina Ros Blankfein and Jennifer Ross, who is Type 1 diabetic, and its execs are saying the right things.“ We want to make sure that the brands that we partner with stand for inclusivity and are reflective of the world that we all live in and share our values,” McKnight, Mattel’s executive VP, told AdAge. But the majority of Barbie’s partners appear to be just like Mattel—huge corporations pushing mass consumerism and profit.
It’s giving problematic in pink.
Maybe this is a two-things-can-be-true situation
But… while the sudden pinkification is both fun and not great (weird how often those two coincide), this is not a new formula. Major studios have been greenlighting projects, and bloating budgets, for movies that have a built-in audience and big merch potential for decades. Think, Disney live action remakes, Marvel’s ever-expanding universe, the endless stream of absolutely terrible Transformer movies. Yes, selling hot pink feminism in this way feels contradictory, but it also could open doors for movies for a demographic that is otherwise being largely overlooked and underserved.
And for its part, Mattel does seem to be invested in innovative and fresh storytelling. “Our top priority is to make really good movies—movies that matter, and that make a cultural footprint,” Kevin McKeon told The New Yorker. The toy conglomerate is workshopping a variety of stories around its various products, and seems to be fairly hands-off in terms of the creative process. The only string? The final product—and it is a product—cannot do “disservice to the brands.”
“Is it a great thing that our great creative actors and filmmakers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products?” Jeremy Barber, Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s agent, asked in the The New Yorker. “I don’t know. But it is the business. So, if that’s what people will consume, then let’s make it more interesting, more complicated.”
We’ll have to wait and see if Mattel and Warner Brother’s collective bet pays off this weekend, though based on social media, news coverage and early reviews, Barbie is poised to be a hit. And Mattel wouldn’t have it any other way. According to the company, Barbie’s purpose has always been “to inspire the limitless potential in every girl.” But don’t get it twisted; Barbie is just a hustler, out here to make money. Her outfits, size, shape, skin, job and home may have changed, but consumerism has always been essential to the Barbie dream.
I guess Barbie’s world is just like ours—a patriarchy where the cost of living is simply too damn high.
Want to read more from Ishani? For her latest work, follow her @ishaninath on the absolute dumpster fire known as Twitter.
Last Reminder: Hot Doc’s Thirst Talks, The Pedro Pascal Edition
On July 25, I’ll be talking about why Pedro Pascal is super hot (and also what his popularity says about female desire, the state of the world and even the experience of being a woman in the year 2023) with three of my favourites—Katherine Singh, Sadaf Ahsan and Meaghan Wray—at a really fun Hot Docs panel. Come through!
The details:
When: July 25 at 7pm
Where: Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W., Toronto
How Much: $15 (But Friday Things readers can get 50% off the ticket price with the code HD062350.)
Get your tickets now!
And Did You Hear About…
The growing Tom Cruise reputation rehabilitation discourse, and this relevant Rolling Stone article on how he’s managed to downplay his ties to Scientology.
The Kit’s excellent take on Kim K’s new wellness-branded energy drink.
This smart analysis of Drake’s cultural impact.
Journalist Andrea González-Ramírez’s honest piece about how her coverage of reproductive injustice in the U.S. has made her give up on the idea of motherhood.
This snarky and extremely on-point Twitter thread.
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