Despite a somewhat mixed fiscal third-quarter result, Mattel CEO Chris Sinclair sees a silver lining emanating from the company’s ongoing quest to transform its culture to better serve and promote customer engagement and brand loyalty.
“We further were very encouraged by the progress we’re making on our turnaround, our cultural transformation, and our strategic priorities,” Sinclair said during the company’s Oct. 15 third-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “Since my first call with you in January, we have been digging deep as I said we would. We’ve begun to make some significant progress in transforming and strengthening ourselves. And today I can quite confidently say that we are radically different and a stronger company than we were just nine months ago.”
Sinclair pointed to reshaping the company culture to emphasize creativity, innovation, speed, and more personal accountability.
“And we have substantially transformed our leadership team to help lead this change,” he explained. “In fact, since January, we’ve changed out over two-thirds of our key senior leaders. We’ve also attracted some extremely talented new executives to help lead us in important areas like human resources, core brands, content and brand, and commercial finance. We’re continuing to streamline further to reduce bureaucracy. We’re also driving stronger performance management systems to build more accountability and to help us drive change.”
Mattel’s pricing and price value is much more competitive now, Sinclair said.
“We’re regaining some very good content deals in the works, including the recently announced Barbie movie with Sony,” he said. We’re continuing to drive the invention and innovation pipeline with ventures like our deals with Google and View-Master and with ToyTalk and Hello Barbie. Retail execution and focus has also improved significantly and we’ve begun to strengthen our top-to-top relationships across all of our major retail and ecommerce customers. We’ve also been building a much more robust holiday strategy and we’ve increased our ad and display support in most of our key accounts.”
Mattel COO Richard Dickson said he expects 2015 to be the most competitive doll market in recent memory.
“We really saw that in Q3 as significant doll competitors hit the shelves with advertising to support the launches,” Dickson said. “So given that, we’re pleased to see Barbie POS continue to hold its own this quarter with global POS up slightly year-to-date and Q3 POS flat. We continue to see positive results in the U.S. where our brand new marketing messages and strategies got an earlier start and we are very happy to see improving POS trends internationally as we cleaned up older inventory and now move into the holiday season with a clean slate and the opportunity to really drive sales. Relevance never rests and the Barbie brand’s renewed commitment to connect to pop culture is really starting to show in POS trends and growing buzz for the brand, both with girls and moms. On the digital front, we saw significant increase in app use this past quarter and our YouTube video views nearly doubled.”
As the holiday season approaches rapidly, Dickson said Mattel is “structurally a much stronger organization. We have focused ourselves wholeheartedly to the creativity, innovation, and speed that made Mattel great. When I speak with partners, licensors, licensees, press, and our own people, there is unmistakable energy and enthusiasm for what we are doing and evidence that we are on the right path. Transformation is hard work and we're making great progress. So my continued thanks to the people of Mattel who I know are today more committed than ever to accelerating our turnaround.”