Barbie,”You can be anything!”…or nearly

I was so happy when I first saw Barbie’s new campaign advertising a few weeks ago. Barbie became a wonderful flagship for girl’s education.

For decades Barbie has always suffered from strong critics regarding the wrong image and messages she sents to little girls, and then for her bad influce. Superficiality, body shape, thinness, perfection… So sales have naturally started to decline as well. This explains why Mattel decided to react and launched a beautiful advertising campaign, willing to radically change the image of his popular doll. The slogan? “What happens when girls are free to imagine they can be anything”. Have a look at it, it’s really well done Barbie’s new advertising campaign.

Not saying that the controverse is totally over now. It seems like “Ooops…they did it again!”

While I was writing this article and doing some research on the net, I discovered that they launched Barbie Engineer, which purpose is to get young girls interested by engineering jobs. She also comes with a kit to construct different type of objects. So this should be again a good news right? Et ben non as we say in French.

First the kit is stereotypically pink as if girls wound not play with it if it was not. And second, the objects to construct are a washing machine, a dressing and shoe shelf ?!? Come on! I do not think I need to explain further right?

So yes, Barbie’s constructors are trying to change her image and I was their first supporter, but there is still a long way to go.