This barbie responds to trends in her own damn time.

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Last month, we shared this to our Instagram story:

Because if you were on Instagram at all during the lead up to the Barbie movie (or in the first couple weeks of its release) you probably saw at least one post about how incredible, how genius, how killer the Barbie movie marketing team was. 

If you work in social media or marketing, you probably scrolled past about 60. The explore page might as well have been Barbie(Marketing)Land.

Since our new service launch, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram, trying to teach the algorithm what kind of content I want to see–it currently doesn’t often give me a lot that I actually do want to explore since our account activity is still so new. So I’ve been spending a little time every few days looking for new accounts to follow in order to fill my feed with posts I actually wanted to engage with. One day when I popped over to the search function, the suggested Barbie post in the grid below (there was always at least one) was of a different tune. 

So I immediately shared it to our story, and followed it up with this:

If you somehow missed the Great Barbie Marketing Praise Craze of 2023, lets review:

Anatomy of a Barbie post:

Slide One: The Big Message:

This is where the big claims are made: The Barbie Marketing Team Deserves A Raise or maybe: What We Can Learn from the Barbie Marketing Team or possibly: The Innovative Genius of the Barbie Marketing Strategy

Slide Two: The Praise.

You’re going to see words like slay. Phrases like killin’ the game. Out of this world. Incredible Power of a Comprehensive Brand. It’s going to mention the $150 million marketing budget as a marker of innovation/risk taking rather than an explanation for the campaign’s success.

Slide Three to Ten: The Checklist.

With all of that hype you’re surely expecting something new and fresh and complex. So let’s take a look at how they did it. Or at least how everyone says they did it.

A Clear Brand Purpose and Message: 

The Barbie Movie was all about female empowerment, so that’s what the marketing focused on, right? 100+ partnerships and collabs gave women and girls all over the world material opportunities to express their uniqueness and personal power through consumerism!

Nostalgia at its Best: 

Who doesn’t love to tap into their inner child? Forget the fact that Mattel partnered with brands who are well known to use child labor. Go back and give your inner child exactly what she needs: something she’ll throw away in three weeks.

(Plus, given how divisive Barbie had become by the late nineties, and taking her critically low rating in 2015 into account, the nostalgia they were marketing felt almost as manufactured as the dolls themselves. Sure my generation played with dolls, but by the time we rolled around Barbie was just one of the many options in Doll-Land. My personal choices leaned more to Polly Pocket or Bratz than Barbie.)  

Embracing Diversity:

Barbie the movie might be about Stereotypical Barbie–the skinny, blonde, heterosexual Barbie we all associate with Barbie, but that doesn’t mean that’s ALL Barbie is. She’s just all we’ll try to emulate through our empowered consumption.

Unexpected Partnerships to Reinforce Brand Values:

A pretty big claim–but there was a ($150M) pretty big budget so I’ll allow for the possibility. But the reality? Not that convincing. 

Let’s look at the values of the Barbie movie:  

Is it…

• A feminist narrative that’s really pushing it? [it, presumably, being the narratives women are allowed to tell?]

• A story about the power of caring for and embracing our inner child?

• A weirdly liberating parable about being whatever (size, profession, attitude) you want to be – whether Ken and The Patriarchy like it or not?

• An entertainingly feisty dismantling of male power?

• A gentle warning on how neglecting your internal life leads to disempowerment?

• An affirmation that life as a real woman is significantly more difficult but resolutely more worthwhile than “life in plastic” could ever be?

• A tongue in cheek portrayal of the liberating power of abortion?¹

• A reminder that you’re not your house, you’re not your girlfriend, you’re not your mink. (You’re not even beach.)

Maybe! Looking at just the movie, the argument could be made for any one of these. I would argue it’s more of a fun summer romp that stumbles its way through those politics, but I see how it tries–only to ultimately be held back, even contradicted by its marketing.  

Let’s look at the messaging of the marketing: 

• Barbiecore didn’t just happen; this was a calculated push toward a certain type of aesthetic femininity. As a gender nonconforming dyke I have to wonder at the limits it was really pushing for how women are allowed and encouraged to express themselves. And maybe femme queer folks feel the exact opposite! But in the moment of tradwife influencers and trans panic, the push for the ultra feminine doesn’t signal liberation for me. 

• Women can be anything…as long as they’re consumers. Barbie is a teacher. A scientist. A writer. An astronaut. But the only path to be like Barbie for us is through beauty or fashion brand collaborations. Though to be fair the girls interested in STEM could try to win a dollhouse for their gaming console.  

• All women are beautiful. But eradicate your cellulite & brighten your skin please. Keep your “bikini line” smooth and hairless and “bright.”  And make sure your teeth are as white as possible by “elevating oral care into oral beauty.” Because the best way to be healthy, is to look it! 

• “You have to remember who Barbie is and what that style is about.” Kind of a “women can be anything. As long as they’re the thing I want to look at” vibe to this statement, no?

• You can turn yourself into a product too. Or at least a free marketing tool. 

• You’re not your girlfriend. And falling into a relationship isn’t the answer. But wouldn’t life be so much better if you were someone’s long-term long-distance low-commitment casual partner? 

Now I’m not the first one to point out the hypocrisy in the Barbie movie marketing. There have been plenty of thoughtful, nuanced explorations of what the movie was trying to do and how it was held back by the very nature of being commercialized art including: 

• Mattel, Malibu Stacy, and the Dialectics of the Barbie Polemic by

  evil female

• Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don't Have To) by

  Jessica DeFino

• On Rebranding Through Storytelling: a Non-Review of Barbie & Film Criticism by

  Madison Huizinga

So what’s my beef? 

Well, first, my work is about staying in line with a business or brand’s purpose and values while working on their messaging. So I can’t help but roll my eyes at how well it works–even when in direct contradiction to the movie’s own themes. 

And I’m not an idiot, I know the Barbie marketing team made an absolute killing doing what they did. It was a good marketing strategy, I’m not denying that. I’m denying it as proof positive of what happens when you invest in women’s stories. Because what Mattel invested in was not women’s stories, or diverse expressions of beauty or little girl’s dreams. They invested in the slam dunk power of nostalgia and preying on women’s insecurities and the very American way of expressing identity through consumption. 

Maybe instead of celebrating the Barbie marketing efforts of Mattel, we should wonder why they so directly go against what the movie itself is trying to communicate? 

(Checking my tinfoil hat at the door) I’d like to offer up to the room the question: is Mattel fine funding a fun feminist romp, so long as they can sway the culture materially in the other direction? As long as women are being flooded with product messaging about how they need to make their bodies smaller, smoother, whiter, how they can find their identity through consumption and reliance on heteronormative relationships, the feminist ideals the movie tries to grapple with can never actually be realized. 

And while we’re on the “why this, why now?” train: what are these posts actually doing? 

It’s all under the guise of educating audiences, but is that what’s actually happening? Did any of them talk about how small businesses who don’t have $150M for marketing could adapt the strategy? Or was it maybe just a way for digital marketers to link their own expertise to an established success without providing anything new themselves?

As someone spending time on Instagram, a big issue for me is the basic fact that these posts are boring, annoying, and unoriginal. They flood our feeds and then determine what works well, like when we all bought into the lie that video content is what we need to be posting, when Facebook actually inflated the numbers–but video became more popular anyway because everyone was told it was what worked well. 

We say something enough and we take it to be true.

It actively changes the digital culture we live in, even when it all started with somebody’s fluff post when they didn’t know what to share to their Instagram feed that day. Maybe the campaign was successful in part because, in an attempt to get their hand in it, people online did their marketing for them. 

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I wanted to get this post to you a couple weeks ago, but life with chronic pain got in the way. And while that can throw a wrench in the best laid plans, here’s our guide on what you can expect from us here:

• monthly roundups of long form articles we’re reading related to:

  • digital content

  • media literacy

  • scammy business tactics

  • online culture

• and our favorite posts from around the web

• posts like this (this one’s on us!)

• deep dives into digital culture/media messaging

We’ve chosen not to offer paid subscriptions for this project. The short version is: we don’t want monetary support for our work to fund anti-trans and white supremacist newsletters on Substack which is, unfortunately how this platform currently operates. If you want to support our work you can send us a tip here:

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hare brained is a passion project. our full time work is working with small businesses to create purpose driven content and cultivate valuable online communities by approaching Instagram and written content strategies from a community and purpose based framework.

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1. I have to admit, I’d love for this one to be the true intention of the scene, but I think the politics of the movie are a little too sloppy to back it up.