Mattel President Plays With Barbie’s Image
Barbie’s new dad is searching for the doll’s missing wow.
Mattel Inc.’s Neil Friedman has the tall order of revitalizing what is still America’s best-selling fashion doll and perhaps the toy industry’s most iconic product. The trouble is, he’s at least the third person in the last five years to have that responsibility, and nothing so far has worked.
An industry veteran who went from leading the company’s successful Fisher-Price line of toys eight months ago to heading up all of the Mattel brands, Friedman thought he saw part of the problem.
“Barbie lacked focus, lacked vision -- even a true, cohesive advertising campaign,” Friedman said in his first interview about his plans since becoming president of Mattel Brands in mid-October. “It was pretty obvious that there wasn’t any excitement there. There was no wow. Barbie should always have a wow.”
The sales numbers showed it. From a peak in the late 1990s, when analysts estimate that Barbie added $2 billion to Mattel’s revenue, sales have been in almost continuous decline. The numbers have fallen in 17 of the last 20 quarters -- often by double-digit percentages. In one of the remaining three quarters, sales were flat.
Within a month of becoming Barbie’s caretaker, Friedman and his new hand-picked head of the girls division, Chuck Scothon, ordered everyone who worked on the doll out of the office.
The team of more than 50 people were assigned homework and told to report to a hotel in Anaheim for a two-day meeting about what the long-suffering but top-selling fashion doll should be. They called it “brandstorming.”
“It could be the toughest job in America,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Harris Nesbitt in New York. “Then, on the other hand, it could be that it only has an upside. If you try it and it doesn’t work, you say it was too late to revive. If it does work, you’re a marketing genius, and if it’s somewhere in the middle, then that’s better than where you were.”
Barbie could use a bit of genius. Although she remains the country’s top fashion doll, her fortunes have been steadily sinking, partly at the hands of MGA Entertainment Inc.’s Bratz dolls. The risque upstarts with the oversize heads have eaten away at Barbie’s market share, particularly among older girls.
Friedman came to the job with a reputation for turnarounds. In his previous position, leading Mattel’s Fisher-Price infant and preschool division, he took a respected but aging brand with fast-encroaching competitors and doubled its $1-billion business with blockbusters such as Tickle Me Elmo.
Before that, he served as president of MCA/Universal merchandising and held various executive roles in small and large toy companies and as a toy buyer.
“There’s no one in any executive suite in the industry that has anything close to his resume,” McGowan said.
Friedman was ready to move quickly when he got his new post. In his first week, he brought in his No. 2 from Fisher-Price, Scothon, to run the girls division and elevated Tim Kilpin, who had headed up marketing strategies and design for the girls brands, to head boys toys.
And he had a message for those who worked for the brands.
“Forget about what other people are doing and focus on continuing to be the leader,” Friedman said. “We are the leader. Act like it.”
Then Friedman held a review of the products the company expected to show for this year’s holiday season. He found that in many cases, the company had gotten away from the basics.
Hot Wheels, he determined, needed more of the traditional tracks that allow kids to race their cars against each other. Those side-by-side racers had been supplanted in recent years by more automated tracks. The line also needed more cars, something consumers will see next year.
The Barbie line, Friedman said, was pretty and well designed. But it was unfocused. Too much of it wasn’t fun and Barbie, too, had moved away from the tried and true.
“There isn’t a fashion doll on the market that doesn’t have a brush or a comb if it has hair. It is a classic play pattern,” Friedman said. “We had some that didn’t.”
With most of the line set 12 to 18 months in advance, there was scant time for major changes for the 2006 line, so Friedman and Scothon tweaked and added.
Plans for the 2006 Barbie styling head, a classic hair-play toy, allowed girls to add colored highlights to the doll’s hair. But that was about the only new thing the doll had to offer.
Friedman’s team quickly suggested an additional feature and now, at the touch of a button, the doll’s hair “grows” out of its head. The Barbie Dream House got lights, sounds and a detachable third floor. The Barbie Van became the Barbie RV with lights, music and a spa tub.
And some of the My Scene dolls, a line for slightly older girls, got realistic expressions. They christened the new group “Fab Faces,” dolls that smile, pout, smirk, raise their eyebrows and open and close their mouths.
For the longer-term changes, the group began with the results of the “brandstorming” -- what Scothon called their “North Star” -- as they came up with the plan for 2007 and beyond: “Dream big in pink heels.”
The new mantra is supposed to be a reminder that Barbie can be anything, not just the princess she mostly has been in recent years. She still loves fashion but has a sassy, girl-centered attitude.
That led the team to a broader and more feature-filled line, with singing and dancing Barbies who bop along to a beat, and pompom Barbies who twirl and flip. There are Barbies for the youngest girls that are easier to dress and a new bride line with a glittering ring, a cake that turns into a play set and a doll hidden inside a floral bouquet.
Friedman and his team seem to be headed in the right direction, said Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and a longtime toy industry observer. But it’s too early to say whether the team’s good ideas will woo consumers, he said.
“His changes are all ones that have improved product,” Silver said. “But I think his real test will be 2007. There’s a lot riding on 2007.”
Part of Barbie’s problem has been that kids are growing out of toys at a younger age, choosing electronics instead of dolls. For Barbie, which once appealed to girls as old as 8 or 9, that’s meant a much smaller audience of the under-5 set.
Although he’s not ready to write off girls older than 6, Friedman said he could dramatically boost the Barbie business even without them.
Give kids enough fun products and they’ll buy the six to eight different Barbie dolls that girls used to buy, Friedman said, rather than the one or two Barbies they’ve been buying for the last few years.
“What we’re doing now is coming up with the play patterns to give the consumer a reason to buy deeper and to collect,” Friedman said.
In addition to working on the toys, Friedman also made structural changes to the operation. He cut 220 jobs in January, rearranged offices so that employees devoted to a particular product line all sit together, and changed the product approval process from a piecemeal, six-week-long ordeal to a one-day, full-line review.
“Toys are not rocket science,” Friedman said. “Things like a turnaround don’t happen overnight, but I’m a firm believer that if you put the right people in the right jobs and you give them the ability to be creative, magic will happen.”
