Marketing a Product for International Women’s Day

A very important day was celebrated around the world last week. This of course being International Women’s Day which occurred on Friday the 8^thof March. Not only do we have this special day to celebrate the women in our lives but it is also a main factor in the progression of women’s rights movement. 

To honour this day, the Barbie brand, under the Mattel company, rolled out a new doll each for the 38 new ‘Barbie Role Models’. This move by the brand is in an attempt to break down traditional barriers formed by society as to what jobs women can and can’t do.

In order to spread the message about the new International Women’s Day release, Barbie promoted the new dolls on their Instagram by posting numerous pictures and videos using the hashtags “#MoreRoleModels” and “#CloseTheDreamGap”. Barbie used one of their social media platforms to market their new products which falls under a medium social presence/media richness and a high self-presentation/self-disclosure in the social media classifications table (Kaplan&Haenlein, 2010). This falls under a medium Social presence due to users only being allowed to comment on the posts or ‘like’ it. It is categorised as high self-presentation/self-disclosure as users are generally using their personal profiles to interact with the Instagram posts.

I think that this was a good way to market the new products introduced by Barbie as most of their target audience would be using Instagram as it directed towards a younger demographic of girls. While Instagram is insanely popular and Barbie has roughly 1.3 million followers (as of 11^thMarch 2019), they chose not to advertise on Facebook which is odd as Facebook as well is not only a largely popular social media platform but also, they have 14 million likes which is more than ten times the amount of their followers on Instagram. Ultimately while Barbie does have more likes on their Facebook, they are not reaching as many people as on Instagram, with just 3,700 views on a video posted on their Facebook page from the 26th of March 2018. To compare the pair, one of their ‘Barbie Role Models’ Instagram videos got over 176,000 views which was posted on the 7^thof March 2019. 

I do feel as though from personal experience it is easier to miss posts on Facebook but generally you will see most posts by pages on Instagram so it was a good move by Barbie to promote on their Instagram.

References:

Kaplan, A & Haenlein, M 2010, ‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media’, Business Horizons, vol. 53, issue 1, pp. 62.