Like Apple and Hewlett Packard, Mattel‘s origin story starts in a garage in California. At first blush, the toy-maker may seem to have little in common with those lauded tech companies and their startup-to-riches stories, but as Mattel looks to reinvent itself for the modern age, its president and COO is tapping into their shared history for inspiration.
“Our founders weren’t toy people, they were designers and inventors. Their world was an amazing hive of creativity and invention in post-war California,” said Richard Dickson. 
Speaking at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas last month, Dickson described the early days of Mattel as if he were talking about a startup company. The founders, he said, had a conviction for taking bold risks – they reinvented the paper doll, bet big on the “revolutionary new medium” of their era (television) and collaborated with like-minded entrepreneurs such as Walt Disney.
It’s telling that Dickson drew so heavily from the startup lexicon. Over the past decade, Mattel’s business has been, well, disrupted. The company is now competing with app-makers, mobile gaming companies and streaming services for children’s time and attention. The way children play has changed, and as that happened, decades-old brands like Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price lost relevance.
So Mattel decided to embrace, as Dickson put it, the “garage mindset.” It started to emphasize speed and innovation, eliminate barriers and embrace big, bold ideas. And for its first test subject, Mattel chose one of its oldest and most iconic toys: Barbie.
The company dug into its research and decided to respond to the number one request it received from young girls – for Barbie to talk. The result was Hello Barbie, a product inspired partially by Apple’s Siri that uses artificial intelligence to allow the doll to speak to its owner.
Though ambitious, the product was far from a home run. There were concerns the doll was sexist in addition to privacy concerns over it eavesdropping on children. Newsweek called it 2015’s “riskiest Christmas present.”
Then, this January, the Barbie brand got the injection of purpose Mattel was looking for. The company overhauled its collection of Barbie dolls and introduced three sizes (petite, curvy and tall), seven skin tones and 22 eye colours.
It was the most drastic change Mattel had ever made to the product and it was designed to signal serious intent. Mothers of young girls, Dickson said, had lost confidence in Barbie as a positive influence on their children’s lives, and with the new lineup, Mattel set out to prove to them it was embracing social change.
“Barbie’s figure has been a source of controversy and concern among some moms,” Dickson said, explaining the company knew the brand had lost its way and was overdue for change. “We understood. We even sympathized with the concerns moms had, but the fear of making a mistake and messing up the most successful toy ever led to inaction.”
An ad campaign accompanying the new lineup, crafted by BBDO San Francisco, declared that beauty comes in many shapes and showed young girls talking about the importance of Barbies looking diverse, just like real women.
According to Mattel, the spot pulled in 50 million views, over 500 million engagements on Facebook and Twitter and was received positively by 81% of mothers with girls two to 10.
The bold changes Mattel had been skittish of were exactly what the Barbie brand needed. The diverse line of dolls and associated campaign earned 5.6 million media impressions and over 5,000 news hits, helping the brand reclaim some of the relevance it had lost. Even better, the socially-conscious changes re-engaged mothers who had abandoned the brand.
With the reinvention of Barbie under its belt, Mattel now plans to roll out similar changes to its entire roster of brands. Dickson, who was previously Mattel’s chief brands officer, said the company was using Barbie as a blueprint for rethinking its other aging brands such as Hot Wheels, Barney and Polly Pocket.
Some products are being re-built for the digital era, while others will see their branding shift along with the culture (notably, Mattel still serves up much of its marketing according to gender binaries – Hot Wheels for boys and Barbie for girls).
The View-Master, for example, re-emerged last fall as a virtual reality set created in partnership with Google, while the ThingMaker was likewise re-introduced in February at New York’s Toy Fair trade show as a 3D co-created.
Other changes the company is making are less apparent, but just as fundamental. Throughout its history, Dickson said Mattel had been “prescriptive,” issuing detailed instruction kits. Now its switching gears and encouraging them to play on their own, he said.
Across all of Mattel’s brands, Dickson said the company planned to re-instill purpose, just as it did with Barbie. And corporately, he’s trying to create a new culture that emphasizes creative sharing, innovation and speed. To return to the spirit of the creative hive the company was built around. Back to the garage.
