Like countless others in the summer of 2023, HBS professor Elie Ofek went to the theater to see the blockbuster film Barbie and found himself enveloped by the pink-drenched marketing blitz that had all but taken over the world. To Ofek, who teaches in the Marketing unit, the “Barbiecore” craze was both a cultural phenomenon and a fascinating case study of a struggling 66-year-old brand’s stunning turnaround effort, using the film to help modernize and reframe the doll for a new generation. In his case, “Barbie: Reviving a Cultural Icon at Mattel,” which has been used in the MBA elective Creating Brand Value, Ofek and his co-authors look at the company’s evolution from toy manufacturer to IP franchise manager and the reinvigoration of the famous and famously fraught brand.

It wasn’t just the considerable hype around the film that drew Ofek to the case. Upon seeing the movie, he says, “My head started spinning: Okay, what did I see here? What are the implications?” As a researcher, Ofek’s interests include toy brands, and he’s written more than one case study in the space, as well as “the tension between purpose and profit,” or how brands might successfully portray societal values in their products and communication, especially as part of a transformation.

Enter Barbie, which had been grappling throughout the 2000s with softer sales as a result of perceptions of problematic beauty standards and gender stereotypes. That Mattel isn’t the only company to struggle with this sort of purpose-profit tension made Barbie’s recent revival that much more intriguing to Ofek, particularly given the big questions the case tackles: What might Barbie do next to keep the good vibes and good business going now that Mattel had shifted its strategy toward an IP model? And what, if anything, can other brands do to replicate Barbie’s big comeback?

Childs Play
“I’ve explored this space before—purpose-and-profit tension, as it relates to diversity and inclusion—having studied the LEGO Group’s efforts to navigate that tension. There’s a heightened sense that these notions matter in the toy world because, with young children, if certain stereotypes are allowed to percolate, they have long-term influences. So Barbie felt like the perfect storm, with its history of wrestling with that tension, this issue of children, and the way the marketing has influenced products and innovation,” Ofek says.

Makeover
“I use this case when we’re talking about companies that have been around for a while and either their brand has stopped resonating or there’s a need to think about company transformation. It’s a good fit because Barbie was on the downswing at one point, and they introduced various iterations of the doll, but it still needed a bigger boost. The new CEO’s approach—this idea that ‘We’re not a toy company anymore; we’re an IP company’—has that flavor of rethinking brand strategy.”

Risky Business
“With this sort of brand marketing, it’s not like you can say, ‘Okay, I’m shooting for some kind of emotion or value, and either it works great or it doesn’t—no harm, no foul.’ No, because people could actually rail against what you’re conveying. It’s a risk to convey values, especially the ones they brought out in the movie, which went further than just saying, ‘Let’s put out a Barbie that’s more curvy or one that’s not as tall.’”

Model Barbie
“There’s the question about whether this new strategy of making brands an IP can work. And the students say, ‘The bar shouldn’t always be about tapping into some societal flashpoint like Barbie did. What if these brands can tap into something people enjoy and appreciate?’ You shouldn’t have to find an issue that’s conflicting or contentious to make it work.”

Let It Go
“There’s the other learning point here, which I think comes out nicely in class, about the tension in marketing between how much control you want over the message and then how engaging you’re going to be. Because Mattel let others take control [in marketing partnerships and in the making of the movie], it was more engaging for consumers because they felt the authenticity. They felt the creativity.”

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