Barbie Lost the War

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Barbie Lost the War Christopher Shannon Post University 1. Why were Mattel’s managers so slow to change their decision making about the design of the Barbie doll over time? What kinds of cognitive errors may have contributed to this? Mattel’s CEO Bob Eckert and his top leadership was the reason for the company not changing Barbie with the current times of our youth. The leadership at Mattel was either arrogant because of the success of Barbie or the were not paying attention to current times; “Changing cultural views about the role of girls, women, sex, marriage, and women working in the last decades shifted the tastes of doll buyers.” (Jones, 2013) Just as the case study mentioned I too think that they were stuck in the mindset of “if its not broke don’t fix it.” This crippled the sales of the doll and when they saw the out come it was too late to fix the problem. They failed at every attempted and Bratz continued to take over the doll market. Mattel was at the top of the mountain when it came to selling dolls for nearly 50 years so there was hesitation to change what had worked for so long. Mattel figured that if they altered the way she looked, dressed, and accessories that parents and kids would not continue to purchase the doll. This backfired on the company and they franticly did everything they could to match what Bratz was selling to their old customers. They failed to conform to the changing of the times where other companies took advantage and started to become very lucrative off of Mattel’s stubbornness. There were several cognitive errors that Mattel made over the course of time that contributed to these decisions. Some of the errors are ego-defensiveness, illusion of control and cognitive dissonance. The company thought that since they had a lock on the competition for decades that they did not have to change anything and they would remain
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