As some of you may have seen, Barbie’s new commercial that was released October of this year depicts young girls using Barbie’s as ways to play pretend scenarios of career paths that the girls might aspire to one day follow. Veering away from the normal reputation that Barbie has of representing an unrealistic expectation of what women should look like, the company is trying to reach out and show that their dolls can be used as an outlet for young girls to follow their dreams and aspire to do whatever they want in their future.

The commercial opens with the question: “What happens when girls are free to imagine they can be anything?” and targets the well-known issue of women’s hardships in the working world and making it in a professional environment. This campaign is helping the company break free of its conforming to this view of women as having to be perfect and not aspire for anything more, and working towards encouraging girls to use the dolls to imagine to be anything they want.

This was an extremely intelligent move for the company. The dolls were widely popular before, even with their controversial appearance and regardless of what the general public may have thought. Recently, Barbie has also come out with dolls of different body types, such as petite, tall, original and curvy. This time of change for the company could help gain a whole new group of consumers, who will agree with idea that girls come in all sizes, and cannot be expected to always look a certain way.

I think this is a big step for a company who was previously very limited in their view of women and got a lot of criticism from people who did not agree with the company’s policies or view of women. This is moving forward with society as well, as many campaigns are being run and views of women’s appearances are changing, Barbie is keeping up with the times. Hopefully, this will teach girls to dream big, and that they are beautiful no matter what size they are!