Blockbuster brand marketing
Entertaining and influential, “Barbie” is commercial to the core but proof that stories build brands–and brand drives growth.
At the time of this writing, “Barbie” (2023), the Warner Brothers film directed by Greta Gerwig and based on the iconic Mattel toy brand, is everywhere we look. After surpassing $1 billion in global box office receipts only three weeks into its release, it’s now the fastest film in Warner Brothers history to hit that mark; one of only 28 films to ever do so; and as the only one of those directed by a woman, it’s the most financially successful female-directed movie ever.
While this chart-busting performance may have exceeded even the studio’s wildest expectations, the success of “Barbie’ is no fluke, but a credit to Mattel’s methodical development strategy, as well as the film’s celebrated director, charismatic stars, and prodigious marketing efforts. If luck factored anywhere, it was in the fortuitously-timed release alongside Chris Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” opus, a coincidence that spawned the Barbenheimer meme and only amplified the hype of both films.
Besides being a bona fide blockbuster, “Barbie” has largely positive reviews, and while I think it may have benefited from different expectations than say a Christopher Nolan biopic, I think the secret to the movie’s success–and a testament to the teams and talent behind it–lies in how it brings to life the abstract concept that is a brand; it demonstrates that the brand, more than anything else, drives growth; and proves that stories are ultimately are what build the associations and meanings that make up any brand.
Why did a Barbie movie even need to be made? The easy answer would be to sell more toys; but if it were mere advertising, there are far less complicated and expensive ways to do that than spend over a decade and millions of dollars to develop, produce, distribute, and market a major motion picture.
In a August 2021 interview with Kara Swisher, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz articulated the vision that brought “Barbie” to life:
“…when I came into the company, I saw an opportunity to transition from being a toy manufacturing company into being an IP-driven, high performing toy company…the company, over the years, became an owner of very heavy manufacturing infrastructure. So the opportunity to me was focused on commercializing the catalog, the I.P. that you own, focus on demand creation rather than invest so heavily in manufacturing.”
Notwithstanding that this strategic pivot also required Mattel to lay off more than 2,000 people, what Kreiz outlines is a clear intent by Mattel to leverage their toy brands for their narrative potential, and the following comment revealed their shrewd grasp of how brand marketing works:
“The mandate is not to make a movie in order to sell more toys, but to make a movie that will be successful and that people will want to watch.”
This sentiment is commendable, if not a tiny bit disingenuous, given his goal is ultimately demand creation. But how does venturing into film development and production help a toy company grow?
Two of the leading researchers on marketing effectiveness, Les Binet and Peter Field, have long argued that brand building is the main driver of long-term brand preference, sales, revenue, and profits. In their landmark 2017 report, Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, they make their case in part by breaking down how brand marketing works:
Brand building means creating mental structures (associations, memories, beliefs, etc.) that will pre-dispose potential customers to choose one brand over another. This is a long-term job involving conditioning consumers through repeated exposure, so it takes time; talking to people long before they come to buy. It requires broad-reach media, because the aim is to prime everyone in the market, regardless of whether or not they are shopping right now. And because most of the audience are not in the market at the time they are exposed, it cannot assume close attention. So it relies heavily on emotional priming, since that cuts through regardless of whether people are interested in the product, and it helps create long-term memory structures. For this reason, emotions tend to have more impact than messages (which mostly get screened out). And brand-building campaigns work best when they get people talking and sharing, because brands are partly social constructs.
If you note the key words and phrases–associations, memories, broad-reach media, emotional priming, long-term memory; talking and sharing; social constructs–one can start to understand why a toy company would see it as worthwhile to invest in high quality mainstream content production–(especially) where a story didn’t already exist. “The Lego Movie” (2014) might be considered the modern standard for this, a smash hit that was itself made possible by the huge earlier success of the Lego-based video game series.
If brand-building is about associations, memory structures, and emotions, how does “Barbie” accomplish this? It works by evoking nostalgia in parent-aged audience members who recognize their childhood toys in the world of the film (that their own kids may now play with). It earns its biggest laughs by poking fun at its own absurd concept and characters through the plastic placidity of life in Barbieland. It sends up its parent brand Mattel as the out-of-touch capitalists (who are in reality pretty in-touch capitalists). And it does all of this while simultaneously relating to the younger generations who’ve grown up with a more diverse and less stereotypical version of Barbie, and aren’t invested in their parents’ generation’s views on life. Finally, it generated enough buzz through its $150 million marketing effort to make seeing the film an event in itself, inspiring moviegoers to show up in their best Barbiecore and compelling writers everywhere to comment on it.
It’s also worth noting that “Barbie” spent considerable time in development in part because the producers were careful to ensure the film was on-brand.
Ultimately, Mattel’s blockbuster may be a clever commercial disguised as an entertaining two-hour popcorn flick, but its performance and influence will undoubtedly pay dividends for the Barbie product lines in the years to come and affirm the strategy behind it. Brand drives growth, and “Barbie” reaffirms that nothing builds brand like storytelling that addresses the audience more as humans than consumers.
