Barbie Growing Pains as the American Girl Goes Global Barbie.Docx
Xiao-Hu WANG
April 8, 2011
4-page paper: Case study of Global Marketing
Barbie: Growing Pains as the American Girl Goes Global
1. Describe Mattel’s global marketing strategy for Barbie and assess its success. Does management demonstrate that it understands and embraces the needs to “think global and act local”?
Mattel's success should be attributed to its representation of American culture, and its Curated Consumption of its products, for example: when parents buy a Barbie doll to the children, it is easily acceptable price position and start , but after purchase it, the parents are bound to face follow-up to buy other clothing products linked to the Barbie doll, thereby it is enable to expand business ; in the aspects of global Marketing, at the initial period, Mattel adopted the regional strategy is highly successful. Differentiate the strategy by the different local or regional cultural, make products more easily blend into the local culture, so that consumers accepted it, especially in the toy market, parents buy the toys can be considered as it represent the parents identify this culture and their expectations of their children; in the other hand, the children often attracted by the trend of popular culture, the change of culture has a profound impact on the development of the market of toys. Not only their successful localized strategy , but also many of its products are produced in China Mainland, because of the advantages of its low labor costs, Mattel can increase its global operations advantage, therefore, the appropriate Global Marketing strategy help Mattel achieves their leading position of today's toy’s market. In the globalized international marketing environment, we should not only focus on one single way of marketing strategies, because of the difference in the local marketing environment, the Marketing strategy of the same product for different region should be as independent producers by the market demand and other factors and to the use of
April 8, 2011
4-page paper: Case study of Global Marketing
Barbie: Growing Pains as the American Girl Goes Global
1. Describe Mattel’s global marketing strategy for Barbie and assess its success. Does management demonstrate that it understands and embraces the needs to “think global and act local”?
Mattel's success should be attributed to its representation of American culture, and its Curated Consumption of its products, for example: when parents buy a Barbie doll to the children, it is easily acceptable price position and start , but after purchase it, the parents are bound to face follow-up to buy other clothing products linked to the Barbie doll, thereby it is enable to expand business ; in the aspects of global Marketing, at the initial period, Mattel adopted the regional strategy is highly successful. Differentiate the strategy by the different local or regional cultural, make products more easily blend into the local culture, so that consumers accepted it, especially in the toy market, parents buy the toys can be considered as it represent the parents identify this culture and their expectations of their children; in the other hand, the children often attracted by the trend of popular culture, the change of culture has a profound impact on the development of the market of toys. Not only their successful localized strategy , but also many of its products are produced in China Mainland, because of the advantages of its low labor costs, Mattel can increase its global operations advantage, therefore, the appropriate Global Marketing strategy help Mattel achieves their leading position of today's toy’s market. In the globalized international marketing environment, we should not only focus on one single way of marketing strategies, because of the difference in the local marketing environment, the Marketing strategy of the same product for different region should be as independent producers by the market demand and other factors and to the use of