An omnichannel marketing strategy that mixes ‘traditional marketing’, pr and digital marketing.
For Barbie’s 60th anniversary Mattel developed an omnichannel Marketing strategy to maximize the reach and Brand Awareness for the worldwide famous doll, let’s see how they planned and executed it.
Strategy
- Planning for most of Mattel’s major campaigns began 12-to-18 months before the event.
- The first step was nailing down the new line of products that would launch in celebration of Barbie’s 60th.
- The goal was to amplify Barbie’s purpose: to inspire the limitless potential in every girl, while also celebrating “the icon that Barbie is,” said Marissa Beck, Mattel’s director of global communications.
Tactics
- At the end of 2018, before any of the birthday events kicked off, Mattel invited reporters from 20 outlets to its headquarters in California for a “full-day immersive program” that focused on its new line of products and shared details from its initiatives focused on empowering girls.
- As part of this program, Mattel has committed to honouring at least 10 female role models each year and announced it would donate $1 from every doll sold over Barbie’s birthday weekend to like-minded organizations.
- Mattel also threw celebratory events for its fans across the country, including an immersive pop-up experience in New York City and a Be Anything tour held at 34 Walmart parking lots across the country.
- The birthday girl herself documented the festivities on social media, including on the Instagram channel @barbie.
- “She travelled to New York, she went to the lighting of the Empire State Building and went to her own party,” Beck said. “That’s the channel where we wanted to bring to light the first-person narrative for the character.”
Barbie also vlogged about the events on YouTube, where she dedicated her birthday to the issue of gender equality.
“That was another way we were reaching our youngest fans with a purposeful message tied to her birthday,” Beck said.
Results
- Barbie’s 60th birthday garnered 3,896 media placements globally, including 938 in the U.S. The list of outlets was diverse, ranging from Allure to New York Magazine to Page Six to Parade Magazine to Vogue U.K.
- More than 4,000 people visited Barbie’s New York birthday pop-up event, including influencers such as Shahidi, Grammy winner H.E.R., Diane von Furstenberg, Anna Sui, and Candace Bushnell.
- On March 9, her actual birthday, Barbie was a trending topic on Twitter in New York City.
- Across platforms, she gained 75,000 new followers thanks to the campaign, which received 4.5 times the global digital engagement on social as other large-scale Barbie campaigns.
- By donating $1 from each doll sold over Barbie’s birthday weekend, the company raised $250,000 for its Barbie Dream Project. The company plans to announce the organizations that will receive the donations in the upcoming months.
“The overall goal was to be everywhere on Barbie’s birthday week, engaging with our fans and celebrating with them online and offline,” said Beck.
Conclusion
The Marketing Strategy that was implemented adopted an omnichannel approach and was focused on awareness.
- different target personas were targeted with a
- different kind of content, from
- online to offline and a multitude of
- messages were spread around through
- different media
which made this strategy not only correct but capable to renew their presence in a really competitive market.
And you? What would you have done differently?
Most importantly, I believe that this kind of marketing strategy could be replicated from a smaller business allowing to
