Brand Failures

Idea failures 51
Mattel explained that the new look was an effort to bring Ken up to date.
‘We did a survey where we asked girls if Barbie should get a new boyfriend
or stick with Ken,’ explained Lisa McKendall, Mattel’s manager of marketing
and communications. ‘They wanted her to stay with Ken, but wanted him
to look. . . cooler.’
However, pretty soon ‘New Ken’ was being dubbed ‘Gay Ken’. The New
York Times, CNN, People magazine and talk-show host Jay Leno saw the doll
as a symbol of shifting gender and sexual identities and values. Ken, whose
apparent purpose in life was to help define the conventional ideal of masculinity
for generations of young girls, had apparently come out of the closet.
This hadn’t been Mattel’s intention. ‘Ken and Barbie both reflect mainstream
society,’ said Lisa McKendall. ‘They reflect what little girls see in their
world – what they see their dads, brothers and uncles wearing they want Ken
to wear.’
Of course, Mattel was now positioned ‘between a rock and a hard place’.
A ‘gay’ doll aimed at children was not going to do them any favours among
middle America. However, if they acted too appalled by the associations they
risked being accused of homophobia.
Crunch-time came when columnist Dan Savage published an article for
gay-oriented newspaper The Stranger, which said that ‘Earring Magic Ken’
included too many signifiers of gay culture for it to be coincidental. ‘Remember
the sudden appearance of African-American Barbie-style dolls after the
full impact of the civil rights movement began to be felt’ Savage asked his
readers. ‘Queer Ken is the high-water mark of, depending on your point of
view, either queer infiltration into popular culture or the thoughtless
appropriation of queer culture by heterosexuals.’
Savage went even further, slamming Mattel’s statement that Ken was
representative of the relatives of the little girls who took part in the research:
‘What the little girls were seeing, and telling Mattel was cool, wasn’t what
their relations were wearing – unless they had hip-queer relatives – but the
homoerotic fashions and imagery they were seeing on MTV, what they saw
Madonna’s dancers wearing in her concerts and films and, as it happens, what
gay rights activists were wearing to demos and raves,’ he wrote.
Following this article, and the interest it caused, Mattel discontinued the
Ken dolls and recalled as many as they could from the shelves. Ken’s brush
with controversy was now over and Barbie could sleep easier knowing her
boyfriend was still interested in her.