Skip to footer

Mattel needs to reinvent Barbie and Hot Wheels: Can you help?

Mattel, the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, is partnering with Quirky Inc. to re-imagine the brand and ask inventors to submit toy proposals. Is crowdsourcing their brand a good idea?

|
Mattel/AP
Mattel will release 23 new Barbies this summer.

With sales down 14 percent as kids gravitate to digital games, Mattel Inc., the maker of Barbie, is betting a new approach can help improve sales: crowdsourcing.

The American toymaker, founded in 1945, is looking for solutions from outsiders, partnering with New York’s Quirky Inc. to encourage inventors to submit product ideas for new toys.

Is crowdsourcing Mattel's best hope?

The Segundo, Calif.-based company officials appear to believe so, as they announced the partnership on Thursday, and said the move is an effort to address declining sales by reinventing the brand.

“This marks a new era for Mattel,” the company’s president and chief operating officer, Richard Dickson, said in a statement. “This new partnership will enable us to accelerate the speed and scope of invention by tapping into Quirky’s dynamic community.”

Individuals can submit their ideas through Quirky’s site. The company said they will focus on re-imagining its Barbie, Fisher-Price, and Hot Wheels brands in time for this year’s holiday season. Individuals whose ideas are selected will also participate in the product-development process.

Other companies have successfully used crowdsourcing to improve their brands and marketing strategies, including General Mills, Coca-Cola, and Unilever. Coca-Cola uses fans’ social media responses in its “Where Will Happiness Strike Next?” ad campaign, which allows Coke customers to submit their own ideas for creating happiness in a series of videos and commercials.

General Mills also accepts ideas from the general public through its “Submit a Novel Proposal” page that began in 2009. The company asks anyone for their input on packaging, ingredients, and strategies for improving their performance as a brand and company. Through this forum, 24-year-old Mark King created a device that measures the texture of granola bars, something the company needed and was unable to find. The pairing benefited not just General Mills, but also an up-and-coming inventor.

“I was going from making things out of Super Glue and bubble gum to making an analytical device for a multibillion-dollar company,” Mr. King said, reported The New York Times.

Kia Kokalitcheva of Fortune.com reported that with Mattel’s mixed first quarter results, it is uncertain whether or not the partnership will benefit the company. Mattel beat analysts’ Q1 performance expectations, but multiple toy product lines, including Barbie, continue to struggle. She wrote:

“While the Quirky partnership could help give Mattel a fresh take on toys and possibly yield a hit or two, these partnerships often account for only a small part of the large companies’ overall businesses.”

And perhaps that is where Mattel needs to save itself. The Detroit Free Press reported that in addition to its Quirky partnership, the company also intends to give Barbie a makeover. Launching in June, the new Barbie will be available in different skin tones, eye and hair colors, and nose shapes to better represent multicultural families. The new Barbie will have 23 different looks.

"This will be an important cultural milestone for the brand," said Dickson, reported the Detroit Free Press.  

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Mattel needs to reinvent Barbie and Hot Wheels: Can you help?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-economy/2015/0418/Mattel-needs-to-reinvent-Barbie-and-Hot-Wheels-Can-you-help
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe