Barbie

Mattel's world-class competitive intelligence system crunches sales reports, children's play-pattern studies, and even findings on where kids go online. The system picked up signals that young girls, heavily influenced by the gyrations of pop star Britney

Since its inception in 1945, Mattel has been collecting market intelligence in some form. While systems and procedures have been upgraded, refined and enhanced, the basics have remained the same.

Mattel's market research department mixes and analyzes data that comes from the company's own financial and inventory systems, plus outside trend and demographic information from at least five market research firms, including ACNielsen; anecdotal research from focus groups; statistics from large consumer surveys; studies of children's play patterns; and sales figures from Wal-Mart and other giants.

Mattel also continuously collects aggregate sales at hundreds of smaller retailers from market researcher NPD Group, which gathers monthly sales figures on Mattel's 107 product lines from store owners across the U.S. and Canada.

Mattel seeds its Oracle and IBM DB2 databases with data on units sold, models, prices and dates, and analyzes past and present sales patterns by brand, geography and other categories—all to help forecast the future.

Analysts at Mattel can run database queries to spot sales trends and conduct profit-and-loss studies by product. Marketing managers like to measure the effectiveness of TV commercials by looking at store-level sales data before and after an ad campaign begins, says Jennifer Caveza, a former marketing brand manager for Mattel's Fisher-Price division.

The numbers also are analyzed in light of observational data from outside researchers and Mattel's own scientists, including "mall intercept" interviews with girls and anecdotes about the competition collected from Mattel's field sales agents, who chat up buyers at the big retail chains.

Employees up and down the Mattel hierarchy are expected to collect and discuss intelligence, using e-mailed updates, text reports filed at private Web sites, and monthly meetings among brand marketers, market researchers, sales managers and product designers.

Even the part-timers Mattel hires in the busy fall season to drive from store to store to set up merchandise and ensure that stores are giving Mattel its negotiated shelf space file daily reports to headquarters on what they find, via a secured Web site.

CEO Eckert himself visits toy stores to eyeball inventory levels of competing products.

Meanwhile, senior consumer research analysts with MBA degrees conduct focus groups and interviews with girls, and then speak as the "voice of the consumer" in presentations to senior managers in the consumer research department. Senior associates in the company's corporate strategic planning group—positions that require not just MBAs but Ivy League MBAs—assess competitors to determine whether to try to beat them or buy them out.

These senior associates, according to job descriptions at Mattel's Web site, also track market shifts in toy categories such as fashion dolls, baby dolls and ride-on vehicles to improve brand sales and profits, and regularly prepare material for Eckert, chief financial officer Kevin Farr and senior vice presidents.

One source of valuable hands-on information is visits by Mattel researchers to children's homes (with parents' OK, of course) to observe and understand play patterns.

For example, if researchers see Barbie dolls displayed on a shelf above a girl's dresser, even if the girls like them, it's an indication they don't play with them regularly. They may even be forgotten, says Zwiers, the former Barbie marketing executive, who founded Funosophy, a toy-brand consulting firm in Long Beach, Calif., after leaving Mattel in 1999.

It's more encouraging to see dolls lying on a pillow on the bed, which indicates they are loved and held. Similarly, dolls seen on the floor next to a box of doll clothes indicates active play.

Seeing what else is in the room also tells a story. Mattel doesn't want to find Barbie on the closet floor and Sasha and Yasmin Bratz on the pillow.

"Having girls tell you in their own words what they have on their bed and why, and what they have stuffed away in their toy box and why, can be so much more revealing than asking a lot of canned questions," she says.