This Guy Saved Barbie From Cultural Extinction. He Did It by Asking One Big Question. Not so long ago, sales of the tall, blonde doll were in a death spiral. Now Barbie is back in a big way.

How do you save a brand that everyone knows, but not everybody likes?

Back in 2014, the toy company Mattel needed an answer to that question — fast. It owns popular brands like Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price, but one of its consistently top-selling products has long been Barbie. The tall, blonde doll enjoyed ubiquity for over half a century, but her popularity was slipping. To many people, Barbie had come to represent outdated standards of beauty and gender norms, and sales had dropped 20% in the prior two years alone. So the company called Richard Dickson, a former Mattel executive who'd left to run a fashion brand, and asked him to come back and save the famed doll. "We were in a real moment of truth around the brand's continued evolution," Dickson says. But he saw a way forward: They would double down on the brand's deeper mission, and then use that to guide many big changes. As a result, since that critical moment, Barbie sales have more than doubled. The brand had its best year ever in 2021, and was on track for more growth in 2022. Here, Dickson explains how he did it — and why he says that "while evolution makes a brand relevant, purpose makes a brand immortal."

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Culture changes rapidly these days. How does that impact the toy business?

With toys, obviously the first thing that comes to mind is fun and play and light subject matter. But when you back up, good toys are a reflection of our times. We're in a day and age where there is a fluidity to play, and toys must allow kids to express themselves freely. In order for these products to stay relevant, they must continue to evolve and move with the times. If we're doing our job right, 10 years from now we'll look back at our current narrative and what Barbie looked like today and say, "Oh my goodness, that was so 2022."

When Mattel first called you, and you saw the situation with Barbie, what did you think?

The numbers were enough to be concerned, but when you got under the hood, what was more concerning was how our brand reputation and relationship with consumers had eroded. Simply put, Barbie was not as relevant as she had been. She wasn't reflecting what girls saw as aspirational in the world. Aesthetically, she wasn't as meaningful. "She didn't have depth," was one of the comments.

Ultimately, it was a call to action. We needed to move from what had been a brand monologue — in which we presented Barbie to consumers and said, "This is who she is" — to a brand dialogue, where we really listened to our consumer, took what they were saying to heart, and filtered that through what we believed the brand needed to be.

What was your approach to pulling that off?

There are really four main components to the Mattel playbook. The first, which is probably the most important and pivotal to any brand, is brand purpose: Why do you exist? What is the origin story that made Barbie so good to begin with? Ultimately, how does that become a manifesto — a center — so that we have a way of operating and deciding what we do and what we don't do?

Purpose really does matter. In the case of Barbie, it's unlocking the imaginations of girls around the world to believe that they can be and do anything. It's inspiring their limitless potential.

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There are infinite ways to fulfill that mission. So what's next?

We then move into what we call design-led insights. We study our consumers, their behaviors, what they like, what they don't like. In some cases, we're developing wants that they didn't know they had associated with the brand. We filter that through our brand purpose, and then we create product.

The third piece of the playbook is what we call cultural relevance. Once you have your purpose and your product narrative, you then can say, "Okay, how do we make this relevant to today? Are there collaborations we could have that feel like-minded with our brand purpose? Who are collaborators that we could work with that fit authentically into our purpose, that complement our narrative, that can be celebrated authentically?" This also includes changing the marketing mix — different platforms, different methodologies — of how we present ourselves, which is a lot more of an art than a science.

Then the last piece of the playbook is executional excellence. Because you could have great ideas, you could even have a phenomenal product, but if you can't execute against it — bringing it to consumers, working with retailers, all of the various different variables that go into driving a business of scale—then it's nothing but a great idea and a great product that never got out there.

How did you apply that process to Barbie?

The beginning of the playbook zoned in on purpose: If we were building the brand today to inspire girls to believe in their limitless potential, what would we do?

From there it became easy to say, "We need to have Barbie reflect what women and girls see in the world." Different body shapes, different ethnicities, different form factors. So we introduced choice. We kept the original body of Barbie, of course, but we expanded it with tall and curvy and various other form factors that reflected how girls and women see the world we live in. That unlocked a world of possibilities.

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Then you had to tell a different story about Barbie, right?

We put a marketing methodology behind it, [aimed] particularly at parents and caregivers, that asked, "What's the value of the Barbie play experience? When a little girl or a little boy plays with Barbie, what happens?" And what happens is it unlocks a world of imagination and possibilities.

You also took some cultural risks, like releasing what was called the first-ever transgender Barbie, which was a collaboration with the actress Laverne Cox.

Barbie in particular is a brand that if you aren't on trend, you're dead in the water. And if you're too trendy, you might be venturing too far out for a brand like ours to be embraced. You have to be right on trend — timeless and timely.

People feel strongly about Barbie, and some people really don't like her. How did you engage with that?

We took it head-on. We wanted to make sure that Barbie lovers loved us more. There were people who just liked Barbie, and we looked at that group and said, "We want to turn 'like' to 'love,' and 'neutral' to 'like.'" There are also Barbie haters, but we're not going to get too distracted with them. Haters may always be haters. If we can move them to "neutral" or "like," then good for us — but we need to be strong in our own conviction about who we are and what our purpose is.