Richard Bates on Barbie, Branding and Unlikely Pairings
by alexparr July 12, 2011Published by: Joe Lazauskas on The New York Egotist
Featuring: Richard Bates, Chief Creative Officer, New York
Richard Bates talks about taking the Barbie experience to China, evolving identities and dogs making out with ducks.
“You can’t really talk about China as one thing; you have to kind of talk about it city by city. The Barbie flagship was in Shanghai, which is, a lot of people would say, the sort of New York City of China. You really have to talk about Shanghai in isolation. If you’re talking about Beijing or any of the smaller cities around there, it would be a very different conversation. Just in the two years we were working on it, there were a lot of global brands coming to China. So the familiarity with that idea and what that meant to the Chinese public in Shanghai was evolving constantly.”