A doll for everyone

Personalization where it matters

Last week Mattel announced they would be launching a Barbie doll with Downs Syndrome (available for pre-order tomorrow).

The doll is part of the Barbie Fashionistas line, which was launched in 2022. It also features a Barbie with a prosthetic leg, a Barbie who uses a wheelchair, and male dolls that are thinner and less muscular.

Mattel has described this collection as its “most diverse and inclusive doll line, offering a variety of skin tones, eye colours, hair colours and textures, body types, disabilities and fashions, to inspire even more stories”.

There are a few marketing stories bundled up in this announcement:

1. Marketing to Employees: I am repeating my standard refrain that employees of large corporations are both significantly more left wing than the average American AND care a lot more about the “values” of their company than its customers do. So launching this doll is a win for employee attraction and retention (it is also getting them PR mentions)

2. SKU proliferation: When Henry Ford scaled the assembly line he famously allowed every customer to get their car in “any color they want, as long as it was black”. General Motors was able to become the next automotive giant through the simple innovation of providing multiple color options. Today it has never been cheaper to create more SKUs with smaller runs — which makes a doll with low demand economical.

3. Shelf Space: Once you have strong awareness for your brand, the compliment is having lots of shelf space where consumers are shopping. In most of the US Heineken is “over-shelved” for it’s market share (because it is in the retailers best interest to upsell consumers to the higher margin dollar beer), but it is “under-shelved” in the Pacific North West where, because of consumer interest, retailers want to have a large variety of micro-beers. Each micro-beer has very little market share, so having even one facing gets it “over-shelved”. For every over-shelved beer, something has to be under-shelved, and the result is under-shelved Heineken. It follows that one way to get more shelf space is to have more brands or SKUs that are popular with some subset of the market. Every niche-Barbie gets put on a shelf can result in “over-shelving” the over-all Barbie brand.

Most personalization is a terrible waste of company resources (more on that next week), but SKU proliferation, if it is affordable from an operations perspective, and palatable from a retailer perspective, can be a very effective way to punch above your market share (and then, as the sales follow, increase your market share).

Keep it simple,

Edward

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p.s., For today’s image I tried to generate a Barbie doll with Downs Syndrom (giving a thumbs up), but apparently MidJourney blocks the creation of any images using the term “Downs Syndrome”. I understand why they do it, but it seems not allowing images of people with DS from being created is more offensive than the alternative.