Interview: Richard Bates on Barbie, Branding and Unlikely Pairings

Friday morning, I caught up with Richard Bates, CCO of The Brand Union (TBU) North America, the WPP-owned “strategy shop.” Bates worked as the Senior VP of Creative Affairs at Atlantic Records, working with artists like Lil' Kim, Diddy, Mick Jagger and Kid Rock, though seemingly not all of them in one room at the same time. Although that would have been awesome.

Note: TBU should not be confused with Tampa Bay University, which I can only assume is a school for exotic dancers.

J: You were involved with the Mattel “House of Barbie” product in Shanghai. What challenges did you find marketing such an American icon in Shanghai?

R: It wasn’t that challenging. Most of China already knew what Barbie was; they had always known. They couldn’t always buy it, it wasn’t always available. They actually call all Caucasian dolls Barbie, “Wawa.” They called all white, Caucasian dolls Barbie, so they were pretty much good to go in terms of that. Mattel was not looking to alter Barbie as a brand specifically for China because Barbie was positioned as a sort of global female celebrity, if you will. Her global status before was appealing to the Chinese market; there really was not an interest in Mattel putting her through the lens, or the filter of China.

J: What advice would you give other marketers going into the China market for the first time?

R: Well, it’s a little hard because I think that the China market is moving so unbelievably quickly that the answer to that probably changes every six months. The development of that project was over two years and I think just the market in terms of launching a flagship store changed dramatically from when we started to when the store opened, even just in terms of how many global flagships were in that region.

You can’t really talk about China as one thing; you have to kind of talk about it city by city. The Barbie flagship was in Shanghai, which is, a lot of people would say, the sort of New York City of China. You really have to talk about Shanghai in isolation. If you’re talking about Beijing or any of the smaller cities around there, it would be a very different conversation. Just in the two years we were working on it, there were a lot of global brands coming to China. So the familiarity with that idea and what that meant to the Chinese public in Shanghai was evolving constantly.

J: Obviously that campaign was a grandiose physical marketing tactic. Did you do anything in the digital and social space to complement it?

R: We were involved in a wide array of touch points for that project. The store was just one component of it. The store was not a toy store, by any means; it was a good experiment to see how far you could stretch the brand. It was the first time that many of the Barbie branded products were all brought together under one roof. Barbie creates a lot of products itself—Mattel does—but they also license a lot of products. It was not a retail space specifically and was certainly not a toy store. It was very much an experiential space in terms of having a yoga center, a health spa, and a designer room for the young girls. [It also had] a fashion show runway experience, chocolate shop, even a bar and restaurant. I’m guessing slightly, but I would say at least 20 percent of the products in the stores were actually toys. There’s a line of Barbie branded fashion in that we brought from Japan that’s very much for adult women—it’s actually quite expensive.

The digital space: Before the store ever launched, there was sort of a virtual version of the store online, in terms of building up a conversation about the store. Part of the store’s dynamic was the very first thing you did when you came in was you signed in and created a Barbie passport.

The idea of a passport was very compelling to the Chinese market because most Chinese don’t have passports. When you created a Barbie passport, you could get stickers and stamps as you went through the space that showed you had participated. That passport also linked you back online to all sorts of offers and activities. In theory, it was also supposed to link you to Barbie branded experiences outside the store. The passport was probably the key to digital experiences but also other physical experiences outside the store. And if you never came back to the store again, that was supposed to be your link to the Barbie brand.

J: Was that passport pushed into the social stream, the way a check-in would?

R: Not at that time, when it was launched. It had a code on it that you would allow you to get into private areas online and interact, but it wasn’t creating a big online social universe. Mattel had lots of other specific branded products that were for online worlds.

J: Are there any digital or social components in campaigns that you’ve found to be particularly successful?

R: Our projects are much more branding oriented. Yes, there’s always dealing with the social component, but we are not the newbie social networking, digital agency specifically.

Currently one of our best clients is Shazam, the app that recognizes music. We’re developing a new identity for them that will really broaden their scope in terms of what the Shazam offering is. We’re not leading the development of the social media aspects of that app, but we’re helping them create the identity that will allow them to be a company that’s much more broader reaching than just that iPhone button app that they have that allows you to read music in a club.

J: What are a couple of examples of branding campaigns that you’ve been proud of recently?

R: Proud of…I think that’s a hard thing to answer. One of the things that’s most present in New York City that we just recently finished but are still working on, is we redid or evolved the identity for Time Warner Cable.

If you’re a Time Warner customer, you’re probably seeing lots of change in terms of your bills and everything that comes to you. Probably the most noticeable change in the city is that there are thousands of trucks running around all over the place with a new identity on them. That was interesting project because normally, when you do an identity for a big brand like Time Warner Cable, the creative idea would be “oh chuck everything and start over.” But that’s not really smart in most cases in terms of brand equity. If a brand has elements of their identity that have strong equity with the consumer, you’re not really doing a service to that brand if you just chuck everything out and start over. There were elements of the previous Time Warner Cable identity that were quite strong and interesting, they were just really under-utilized. And I would say not just underutilized, but used quite poorly.

J: What were those elements?

R: Particularly an icon. Most people don’t know what it is, but it’s an eye-ear. They call it an eye-ear. It’s the icon that was their logo, but it was always just a tiny little mark in blue that was locked up with lots of copy in the corner of the bill. That was pretty much the only time you would see it. Now, if you see the trucks running around the city it’s huge, it’s on the entire side of the truck. Essentially, there are giant eye ears driving around all over the city, in much brighter colors.

J: Last question: What’s the best unusable/offensive idea you’ve ever had?

R: We were doing a wine label for a wine company, and it was a blend. It was not one variety of grape. It was a mix, a blend of different things. We had the idea of—this is going to sound crazy, but—we had an illustration of a duck, um, making out with a dog. So it was kind of like two very different things hooking up. It was very compelling, and then it was surprising to see. If you looked at the back of a label, we had an image of a new creature that was half duck and half dog. Obviously, the duck and the dog had gotten together and made something new, à la the blend of all the different varieties of grapes. It was a fun idea, but I guess they weren’t ready to go there.

J: What did they end up going with?

R: Something much more conventional, I’ll say.