What we can all learn from the Barbie marketing campaign

The Barbie movie has just smashed The Dark Knight’s 15-year-old box office record. Barbie’s marketing budget was colossal, but its fundamental strategies can be used by organisations of any size, even those with the smallest of budgets.

Partnerships and collaborations with complementary organisations are a very effective way to amplify your brand. The team behind the Barbie movie partnered to create collaboration with a long list of complementary brands, bringing Barbie-fied products to millions of film-goers. Their collaboration with Airbnb created Barbie’s Dreamhouse and gave away a free stay at the all-pink Malibu mansion. Other notable brand collaborations included making Barbie donuts with Krispy Kreme, offering up Barbie and Ken as dating cheerleaders with Bumble, and giving the Tangleteezer a totally pink Barbie makeover. Such collaborations are a great way for brands to come together for mutual benefit, tapping into each other’s complementary audiences and increasing reach and engagement.

Collaborations like this can also include working with influencers. One such example with a more realistic budget is our recent Instagram influencer campaign with one of our clients, a high quality housebuilder. We ensured this campaign would be very relevant to the target audience, carefully selecting the influencer and planning the campaign to chime with the target audience. Thanks to this successful collaboration, for a very reasonable budget, we were able to drive four apartment reservations at this luxury development and a 300% uplift in sales in the month following the campaign.

From Barbie selfies to an original soundtrack for TikTok which has been used on almost 200,000 posts, the marketing team at Barbie capitalised on a number of social media trends, ensuring their content shone the brightest pink.  Our own Perceptive pink might be a few shades darker, but we’re firmly in the Barbie camp when it comes to maximising the latest trends. We’ve driven some great engagement for our clients using today’s hottest formats like educational carousel posts, LinkedIn newsletters and short-form video reels.

There’s no doubt the Barbie brand has evolved since its launch in the 1950s. Today, the slogan ‘You Can Be Anything’ is a symbol of hope and inclusivity, and the themes of feminism and female empowerment that are present in the film have been predictably prominent across their communication channels.

Just as Barbie has embraced its values, so should your brand. What is it that makes your brand unique? What do you stand for and how do you want to be perceived? Our client, George Buchanan Architects is a small architectural studio in Glasgow that prides itself on its design flexibility, expert customer service, and use of innovative techniques. Showcasing their new virtual reality headset for example, is just one way we’ve demonstrated that they are at the cutting edge of their industry.

There’s also been a perceptible focus on authenticity from team Barbie, showcasing not just the characters, but the actors depicting them. In a similar way, we‘ve seen our clients’ social media channels really take off when we’ve placed their people at its heart. For engineering client Will Rudd, a ‘meet the team’ series and regular content around new starts, promotions and events, has helped us build a social media community that is four times more engaged than the industry average.

While the Barbie movie is using their huge budget to target a very wide mass market, many organisations have a much more specific target market so can make a smaller budget work hard. Most of our clients at Perceptive have very clearly defined audiences. This allows us to be laser-focused both on social media and in our wider PR and communications, achieving great results with much smaller budgets.

The team at Barbie may have spent more money marketing the film than they did actually creating it, but I still think there’s a lot we can learn from what was probably the greatest movie marketing campaign in history.

Mike Christoforou is Social Media & PR Manager at Perceptive Communicators,  which provides PR, social media, digital, marketing and public affairs support to clients in science, technology and the built environment which improve lives and transform futures www.perceptivecommunicators.co.uk.