The Man Who Became a Billionaire Through His Fight to the Death With Barbie
forbes.com
forbes.com
Are you kidding me? You exploited these kids' minds and brainwashed them into wanting your product which has dealt irreparable harm to their self image.
I can't read the rest of the article; I'm too upset by his self delusion.
Chimpanzee girls play with dolls (chimp technology isn't quite at our levels, so their dolls are just sticks they found).
As a side note, one thing that somehow saddens me is modern Chinese terminology for dolls. 娃娃[wa wa] is a word for "baby" (how they got the idea to refer to babies as "wa wa", we may never know ;) ), and is also the standard word for "doll". A traditional doll is referred to most explicitly as 布娃娃[bu wa wa], "cloth doll"; it's the kind of doll a little girl might make for herself out of some spare material.
The term for a nice doll, the kind you'd buy in a store? 洋娃娃[yang wa wa].
"Foreign doll".
- my dictionary includes several words where 娃娃 seems to refer to a child and not a doll, e.g. 抱娃娃 娃娃兵 娃娃车. It's conceivable that they're all metaphors, I guess.
- I tried once to refer to a doll as 娃, mirroring an actual usage I'd seen, and my then tutor (from Guangzhou) complained that with just one 娃 you're referring to a human.
Having become ashamed of my lazy answer, I just asked a college student in Shanghai; she informs me "you can call a baby 娃娃".
What about a billionaire cigarette tycoon, drug lord, or arms dealer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_M._Kelley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapo_Guzman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi
Their product had "value" in the sense that somebody was willing to pay for it, but clearly it's possible to become a billionaire while having a net negative effect on society.
"Having a passion for making ____ and a passion for winning" - Rich guy
Where ___ is something harmful to society/morals/environment
Sounds like a great lesson to teach. The younger, the better.
At least the guy is just selling toys. Beats the heck out of a politician trying to force his grand schemes on everyone in society.
I can assure you that my 11 year old niece will make better buying decisions that benefit her in all sorts of ways, than the homeless guy down the street, who I suspect is under a serious bout of depression.
I'm not being flippant, I'm interested in reading the logic you're operating on. I don't see how you can argue that there are moral considerations when advertising to children, but then ignore a really significant part of the population that is also being exploited in pretty much the same way. Either advertising has moral hazards all around for everyone of impaired and/or undeveloped intelligence -- young and old, or it doesn't. I don't see how you can pick and choose.
Consider what's being advertised to people who have the aforementioned mental disorders:
Eating disorder = fast foods of all sorts, Mcdonald's, KFC, Burger King, etc. ice cream, chips, candies. None of this is extremely "healthy". Conversely on the other side, in which people avoid food, there is diet pills, weight loss through questionable means, etc.
Drug addiction = alcohol, tobacco (though there is less of this now)
Depression, impulse control disorder, and poor memory are conditions that affect buying decisions on a wide array of things, sort of catch-all conditions.
A lot of people have these disorders. But there's been no effort made to do anything about this, with respect to how advertisements affect these folk. I would also like to point out something about the power of the two types of things sold here -- things that are definitely bad for you (alcohol, unhealthy food, expensive toys (because they leave you with less money to buy good food)), and dolls. I think one can reasonably defend the point that things being marketed to adults with poor decision-making skills harm them more than little girls being shown advertisements of dolls or whatever.
Fast food (to pick your first example) is marketed to basically everyone not specifically to people that have eating disorders.
But this isn't black & white. Many people do, in fact, have moral problems with the marketing techniques of the fast food/junk food industry despite that fact that most of their customers are fully capable adults. These people have made efforts to limit what they can do, and I think most reasonable people would at least agree that their proposals are worth considering.
Finally, I'm not sure about your last point about "more harm." Doll marketing is a part of a very serious sexism we have in our country. Surely it's only a small part, but it's a very serious problem. It's hard to quantify these things to make comparisons.
I accept that it's only a certain part of the market in which participating adults are not mentally intelligent enough to make informed decisions. You (apparently) accept that only a small part of marketing (dolls) to children is a problem (though rayiner seems to be totally against marketing to children altogether -- and it was to that point that my original reply was to).
It would seem that we two should agree on a conclusion: advertising for all needs to be re-thought fundamentally. Cut out sexism, racism, sexual appeals in ads, as well as the wide variety of carefully, psychologically constructed ads in adult market, and cut out advertising highly sexualized dolls.
I want to make a note that only these sexualized dolls are problematic. If you have a daughter you know that girls just prefer dolls and other girly things in an innate way (I'm practically a daddy of two, and despite all my trying to get them hooked on cars, action heroes, computers, they just always opt for the dolls when given the choice). There's nothing wrong with girls having dolls of all sorts, just that they shouldn't be sexualized.
Is it too much to wonder "why is any of that described conduct even legally questionable?"?
I mean, say you're Mattel and you have a nasty, exclusive, NDA-ridden contract with some key employees. MGA surreptitiously hires those employees for side projects. Obviously, you can have a cause of action against the employees. But against MGA?
Mattel believed that it owned the rights to designs created by its employees, and Carter Bryant was an employee. Another company profits from the design Mattel believes it owns, so they sue the company.
Mattel produced evidence that Bryant used Mattel resources and time, and even got other employees to help with the design.
The counterclaims are even worse.
Here we have 'In the early 1980s they moved on to consumer electronics, repackaging Nintendo's GameBoy forerunner, the Game & Watch, pulling in $21 million in sales the first year. That fad passed after a couple of years but left Larian with an appetite for the toy business. When a struggling inventor in 1996 brought him a design for a talking doll already passed over by Mattel and others, Larian pounced. Singing Bouncy Baby was the surprise runaway hit of 1997.'
So by '96 he was in position to talk to with inventors and bring their ideas to be 'runaway hits' (which I understand is largely about marketing). To me (personally) the path from nothing to someone who can bring runaway toy to market is more interesting than how they build the business beyond that point.
> Larian and his brother went into business as importer-exporters in 1979, selling schlocky brass figurines from South Korea. (They were also maneuvering their parents’ money out of Iran.)
For that purpose, it's not really necessary to do especially well, since profits aren't what you're looking for (if you can turn $20,000,000 locked in Iran into $14,000,000 in the US, that could be a win!). But they seem to have discovered that they could generate profits anyway, and things took off from there.
I have no idea.
Many toys are fucking evil. It's a bizarre, horrible, industry.
He didn't become a billionaire through his fight with Mattel, he became one in spite of it.
Or did I read the article wrong?
Sounds like the best client ever.
Hyperbolic Examples: So something drug addicts want is a terrible product? So something murderers want is a terrible product?
I would say that it is a terrible product because it promotes a self image that is over sexualized to young children.