How Barbie Lost her Groove

Why Mattel’s managers were able to slowly change decision making over time.

Mattel launched Barbie was 1960, and was doing exemplary in the market. Parents preferred Barbie over other dolls for their children because it had an ideal women image. Over time, the sale of Barbie became stagnant as the taste and preferences of customers changed.  With an advancing world, Barbie’s market cultural views took a paradigm shift.  People began holding different views towards occupation, the role of girls and other related factors.

  

On the other hand, managers at Barbie were contented with the profit they were making out of Barbie and resisted the urge to alter the product. They thought that making changes would alter the appearance of the doll which would impact the sale of the product. They did not realize that by failing to change the design of the doll to suit customers’ taste and preference, it risked losing its best seller position in the market.

As a result, the managers were unprepared when a new kind of doll, the Bratz doll, was introduced in the market (Nash & Duvall, 2005).Many competitors to Barbie had surfaced over the years since the doll business was viewed as profitable; however, no other doll had matched Barbie’s appeal to young girls. Mattel was unprepared for this type of trouble. As a result, strategic managers were forced to change its strategies and business model to bring Barbie up to date.

What kinds of cognitive errors contributed?

The most obvious cognitive error that faced Barbie lied in its product innovation. Product innovation was inconsistent, and the business failed to keep pace with changes in its market. Mattel’s designers should have been adventurous and made more radical changes earlier. The rapid changes in the market required strategic managers to speed up their decision making. However, they got left behind by agile competitors who act in response to shifting customer preferences (McNamara & Bromiley 1997). Barbie’s advantage as best-selling global doll overturned as managers made major strategic errors in the 2000s.

Factors related to organizational culture and innovation that influenced Mattel to move in a more positive direction.

Organizational culture comprises a set of shared values and norms that influence how the entity’s members’ behave and interact with others.  An organization’s culture can be detrimental as it was the case with Mattel. Mattel’s culture was characterized by the reluctance to change with the environment. Their lack of focus on market factors and control mentality hindered innovation and caused their company to lose traction in the doll market. Managers had an illusion of control which contributed to Mattel’s sluggishness in its decision-making process. An Illusion of control contributed to the behavior of overestimating the extent of managers’ control over a situation.  Managers in the organization were overconfident in the sustained success of the Barbie doll (Nash & Duvall, 2005). The confidence was based on the past success. As a result, they refused to acknowledge considerable changes within the environment.  They overestimated the organization’s ability to continue to outdo competitors and did not have a plan for the situation such as the introduction of the Bratz doll.  Mattel reacted after the drop in sales due to the success of competitor doll. In the absence of the culture, managers at Mattel would have been able to make more careful and well-planned decisions in reaction to market forces. 

References

 McNamara G. & Bromiley P. (1997). Decision making in an organizational setting: cognitive and organizational influences on risk assessment in commercial lending. Academy of Management JournaJ 17. 1997 Vol. 40, No. 5. 1063-108

Nash & Duvall (2005). How Barbie Lost her Groove

Carolyn Morgan is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in research paper writing services if you need a similar paper you can place your order from Top American Writing Services.