Barbie: "Don't look at me, look at the goal".

Everybody is discussing whether the Barbie movie is a great marketing move. But they mostly focus on the wrong stuff.?

They focus on the budget, movie trivialities, and the fact Barbie benefits already from great brand awareness.?

But these are only some of the inputs, not the outputs.

And the success of this massive marketing circus will be based on the outputs (results) and if it is worth it (ROI).

LARGE MARKETING BUDGET FALLACY

"You got a large budget, so it's going to be easy."?

A large budget enables more options, it doesn't translate into more results. So by itself doesn't guarantee any success.?

Actually, the higher the budget the more difficult it is to spend it properly.?

Moreover large budget in absolute terms doesn't mean anything by itself, if not compared to company size, landscape and goals.?

Creating a good movie is expensive and highly risky even for the best professionals in Hollywood, but this is not Barbie's goal.?

Barbie's bar is much higher: the short-term goal is to create a blockbuster movie as her first movie, so her "mummy" (Mattel company) can start a media franchise, and then sell more products too.?

The rules of the game are pushing you to massively overspend.?

The cost of losing the opportunity to create a media franchise, highly dependent on your first movie, is simply too high.

LET'S DO A MOVIE FALLACY

"With all that money I could do a movie too"?

Thousands of companies in the world could do a movie, tomorrow.?

But they don't.?

The point is not to do or not to do a movie.?

The point is if and how a movie makes sense for your brand and business strategy.?

And for most companies the link between a good movie and its impact on their business is simply too little or too much far fetched.?

STRONG BRAND AWARENESS FALLACY

"With strong brand awareness it's easy to do a good movie"?

Again, what are we talking about??

Creating a decent movie and selling some tickets is not the goal.?

Getting lots of PR attention for even more Barbie brand awareness? What's the point of? getting more brand awareness if it's already super strong?

The goal is to get people to purchase tickets to a degree it looks a positive outlier to kick off the media franchise and then sell lots of Barbies too.?

It's about both adults and kids purchasing journeys.

It's about consideration and purchase phases, not awareness.?

SOME FACTS

What's the value this $150 million marketing budget (+ production costs) needs to create to be judged successful? Some early facts:

1. The movie produced $500 million in revenues in 5 days.?

2. Barbie owner, Mattel, in the last month increased its company value by around 30% or $2 billion.

3. Mattel sales have been flat across 2021 and 2022. They probably need something that moves the needle. And their needle is in the order of millions of Barbie (hundreds of millions of dollars). Rumors say sales are on the rise, but this point is still unclear. At the latest Mattel Q2 2023 quarterly earnings will tell us what happened.?

Marvel succeeded in creating a media franchise.

Hasbro tried and got very different results.

As always, it's about the execution.

Barbie, so far, looks to be on a very good trajectory..

#barbie #marketing #facts