In her nearly six decades, perhaps no year has brought bigger change for Barbie than 2016.
After watching the famous doll's dominant market share slip every year since 2009, Mattel gambled in January on a makeover. It gave Barbie more varied body shapes, skin tones and hair types. The overture was meant to address what has long been the hardest part of selling Barbie: Legions of parents who think the buxom, often-pale-skinned doll sends a lousy message to girls about beauty standards.
But, it turns out, her body was only part of the problem.
Barbie, it seems, has developed a reputation as something of a material girl.
"A lot of the conversation was focused on what Barbie had -- her stuff," said Tania Missad, Mattel's senior director of global insights.
Mattel researchers found that when people thought of Barbie, they thought about the pink convertible, the Dreamhouse and the closet full of tiny plastic stilettos. They thought of a character whose life was more Real Housewives than real world.
And that, executives knew, was a problem. Generation X parents (born roughly from the early 1960s to mid-1970s) were often content to have their girls play with a doll as long as it was merely entertaining. They found that millennials (born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) , however, were fixated on giving their children toys that had purpose and meaning.
And so begins yet another quest for Mattel: It is working to use marketing and other strategies to reposition Barbie as an emblem of imaginative, creative play.
The toy will likely find a receptive audience in moms who have nostalgia for the brand, the ones who remember the offbeat careers and personal adventures they cooked up while playing with the dolls. And yet they'll be challenged by the persistent perception that Barbie is a perpetrator of gender stereotypes, not an agent for smashing them.
Until now, if Mattel advertised on television, it was largely with commercials that spoke directly to 5- to 7-year-old girls, offering descriptions of the toys and showing them how to play with them.
But, starting this fall, look for ads aimed squarely at parents. During Dancing With the Stars and some of ABC's Christmas-season programming, for example, executives plan to run a 30-second spot that shows a girl pretending to be a science professor and lecturing her Barbies about the human brain.
And before that, Mattel will take a new tack in marketing its President and Vice President Barbie dolls, a set that has been rolling into stores in recent weeks. While it's not new that Barbie is running for the highest office in the land -- she's been doing so in most presidential campaign years since 1992 -- it is new that she comes with a running mate. And Mattel this year has teamed up with a nonprofit group called She Should Run to cast the tiny politicos in a somewhat different light.
She Should Run is a nonpartisan group that works to get more women interested in seeking public office. Instead of just presenting girls with an elegantly coiffed doll in a White House-worthy power suit, the dolls' packaging will come with a prompt to download a worksheet co-created with She Should Run that's meant to get parents and kids talking about leadership.
The worksheet asks girls to circle words that describe them as leaders, with choices such as "brave" and "fearless." And it has a fill-in-the-blank speech where girls can write about what they would do if they were president, a clear bid to push the buttons of the purpose-driven millennial parent.
Mattel executives like to say that they want to change the focus from what Barbie has to what kind of play activity Barbie enables.
"It's sort of the beginning of our brand to start encouraging girls to do something," said Lisa McKnight, senior vice president and general manager of the Barbie brand.
For those wondering whether the doll is a warm embrace of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Mattel notes that the company works on an 18-month product cycle, so this doll was in the works before the outcome was clear in this year's presidential race. (And, for what it's worth, President Barbie's skirt suit and Vice President Barbie's short peplum top are decidedly un-Clintonian ensembles.)
Mattel has also convened an advisory council of people outside the toy industry to offer different assessments of the Barbie brand. The group includes young female entrepreneurs, women who work in science and math fields, and Erin Loos Cutraro, chief executive of She Should Run.
That's because the company has realized that while mothers and girls are its primary audience, there are plenty of people who don't buy Barbies but are critical in shaping the conversation about them on social media and elsewhere. The council is an effort to get big-picture perspective on how the doll is perceived in the marketplace, and represents a shift for a toy brand that was typically very secretive about its intellectual property.
Other companies are taking a similar approach. Warby Parker has gained traction in part by touting its donations to nonprofits in order to increase access to eyeglasses. Apparel startup Everlane has found an audience by telling what factory has made each piece of apparel it sells. Millennials have shown that they like their shopping with a side of corporate responsibility.
It is urgent for Mattel to cater to this mindset. The company was dealt a blow when Disney decided to take its lucrative Princess licenses to rival toy-maker Hasbro. And while its portfolio includes other major toy lines such as Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price and American Girl, Barbie is among its biggest attractions, with $906 million in gross sales last year.
Mattel executives say that, in some ways, this new strategy takes the brand back to its roots. Before Barbie, most dolls were baby dolls, designed to allow girls to practice nurturing. Barbie was invented by a mother named Ruth Handler who wanted girls to have the option of acting out other grown-up activities.
There are early signs that the efforts to reinvent the brand are working. In the United States, Barbie saw sales momentum picking up in the second half of 2015 and an increase in sales at retail stores in the first quarter. More data are scheduled when Mattel reports second-quarter earnings Wednesday.
The company says it is encouraged by its recent interactions with customers. For example, some parents seemed more willing to take a Barbie as a gift to a child's birthday party.
In the past, Missad said, "Mothers would tell us, 'I don't know if I can bring a Barbie to a party. I don't know if the other mom would want that in her household.'"
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