Tuesday 18 October 2011

Ken Dumps Barbie, Leading Mattel To Rethink Its Rainforest Relationship

Greenpeace's successful campaign to get the toy company to change its packaging has lessons for future plans to target large companies to improve their behavior: Amp up the humor and go viral.


Sometimes it takes humor to make a serious point. That seems to be the lesson from Greenpeace’s “Barbie, It’s Over” campaign--which recently resulted in Mattel overturning how it packages its products, including its famous Barbie and Ken dolls.
This summer, Greenpeace created a video showing Ken dumping Barbie (“I don't date girls who are into deforestation”), a mock Twitter feud, photos of Barbie chainsawing logs, and a huge banner on the wall of Mattel’s L.A. headquarters. It was hoping to draw attention to the toy industry’s use of paper from the Indonesian rainforest in its packaging, and it succeeded. The video, photos, and tweets went viral, leading 500,000 people to send emails to Mattel in protest, and the media to report the story extensively. 

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