Advertising & Branding to Children

I have an addiction to Yahoo news. A lot of the times, Yahoo has the saddest stories, but there are those moments when they have inspiring stories as well. I have chosen to look at the branding side of an article that was posted last week on Yahoo. This article is about a young girl who wrote a letter to the Bratz maker, MGA Entertainment, to change their dolls up to look more like her. She wanted less makeup, shorter hair, longer dresses than usual and for the dolls not to be mostly blond.

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/girl%E2%80%99s-letter-prompts-bratz-dolls-maker-to-create-custom-dolls-213131169.html

This interested me because of our class talk about advertising with kids. Companies love children because they are full of ideas, and also because they are the “sell to” target. In class, branding to children was sort of seen as a bad thing, but what if it wasn’t. From the example I have above shows that kids can have a mind of their own and can go against what’s “cool.” I think that even though there are such things as the “cool” or the “lame” brands, children knowing which brands are which, help better the companies.

This 8 year old girl, Angelina, chose to write a letter, not via internet or technology, but a cute sloppy hand written letter to the company. Angelina did not even have to start a petition to get a response from the company, which I thought was cool because to me that means companies can listen without embarrassing pressured action to satisfy the consumer. She got a response from MGA Entertainment saying they were “inspired” and they sent her three dolls that were picked from the Bratz custom designs from fans. Two of those dolls were blond and one of the blonds included a short bob and a longer dress. In terms of the makeup, it was not as heavy as I have seen my own Bratz dolls, but yes they still included makeup.

 

I would have like to see the company actual make a doll that resembled Angelina or to at least have natural colors for the makeup choice. However, since Angelina was satisfied with the custom dolls and that MGA Entertainment even responded to her letter, I guess that makes me happy too.