The Marketing of Children’s Toys Critical Perspectives on Children’s Consumer Culture

This book offers rich critical perspectives on the marketing of a variety of toys, brands, and product categories. Topics include marketing undertaken by specific children’s toy brands such as American Girl, Barbie, Disney, GoldieBlox, Fisher-Price, and LEGO, and marketing trends characterizing broader toy categories such as on-trend grotesque toys; toy firearms; minimalist toys; toyetics; toys meant to offer diverse representation; STEM toys; and unboxing videos. Toy marketing warrants a sustained scholarly critique because of toys’ cultural significance and their roles in children’s lives, as well as the industry’s economic importance. Discourses surrounding toys—including who certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners’ identities—have implications for our understandings of adults’ expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.

Introduction.- Rebecca C. Hains & Nancy A. Jennings.-SECTION ONE: TOY TRENDS.- 1.       Toying with Guns: A Critical Analysis of Play Firearms.- Jody Lynée Madeira, Professor of Law and Louis F Niezer Faculty Fellow, Indiana University Maurer School of Law.- 2.        Reclaiming the Livingroom: The Play Value of Grotesque Toys.- Tyler Brunette, Ph.D. student, University of Pittsburgh, the Department of Communication.- 3.       Playing with Minimalism: The Promotion of High-End Toys and Childhood Simplicity.- Spring-Serenity Duvall, Associate Professor of Communication, Salem College.- 4.       Imported Toys in Indonesia: Parental Consumer Literacy, Purchase Decisions, and Globalization.- Rani Chandra Oktaviani and Fadlin Nur Ichwan, Lecturers, TheLondon School of Public Relations, Jakarta.- SECTION TWO: TOY MARKETING.- 5.       Totally Toyetic.- Jonathon Lundy, Ph.D. Candidate, Drexel University.- 6.       Unwrapping Toy TV: YouTube Kids and the role of Toy Unboxing and Play Videos.- Kyra Hunting, Assistant Professor, Media Arts and Studies, The University of Kentucky.- 7.       Disney Toy Marketing Addresses Latina/os.- Diana Leon-Boys and Angharad N. Valdivia, Research Professor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.- 8.  A Toy for Thoughtful Parents:  Explaining the Rhetorical Origins of the American Public’s Love for LEGO.- Lauren DeLaCruz, Ph.D. Candidate, Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern University.- SECTION THREE: TOYS AND GENDER.- 9. “Smart is the New Cool”: Project MC2 and the Marketing of STEM Lifestyles to Tween Girls.- Avi Santo, Chair, Department of Communications & Theater Arts, Old Dominion University.- 10. Hacking Girl Power: GoldieBlox and Material Rhetoric.- Margeaux Lippman Hoskins, Lecturer, Dutchess Community College, Poughkeepsie, NY.- 11. Toy discourses and gendered roles in “the most gender equal country in the world”: A critical cultural analysis of toy catalogues from 2011-2018.- Trine Kvidal-Røvik, Associate Professor, Department.- Tourism and Northern Studies, The Arctic University of Norway.- 12. American Girl and the Construction of Masculinity.- Emilie Zaslow, Associate Professor, Pace University, New York.- 13. The Politics of Barbie’s Curvy New Body: Marketing Mattel’s “Fashionista” Line.- Rebecca Hains, Professor of Media and Communication, Salem State University.

Rebecca Hains, PhD., is Professor of Media and Communication at Salem State University, USA. She is author of Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood on Screen and in Everyday Life (2012) and The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years (2014) and co-editor of Cultural Studies of LEGO: More Than Just Bricks (2019).

Nancy Jennings, PhD., is a Professor in the Department of Communication with affiliate appointments in the Department of Journalism and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA. She is also Director of the Children’s Education and Entertainment Research (CHEER) Lab.