Nickelodeon Marketing Department is Teh Stupid

Via Insty pointing to Toy Whimsy, we learn That Nickelodeon is planning the "Skank Dora the Explorer" doll:

After a little detective work, I learned that Nickelodeon, Mattel, and Viacom Consumer Products have big plans to offer a slightly older "tween" version of Dora. Details haven't been released, but we do know that Dora will move to the city and become a fashionista to appeal to the older "tween" crowd later in the year. Dolls, accessories, and new friends (known as Dora's Explorer Girls) will be released which will somehow interact with a new online world. Other than a silhouette seen above, we really have no idea what the older Dora will look. The strange thing is, we're already seeing a huge backlash brewing with descriptions like "slutty" (and worse) being thrown around to describe the new Dora. There's even a petition that's well on it's way to 4,000 disgruntled parents growing online.

If you have a child that likes Dora (as we did, when #2 Son was very young), you should RTWT. Nickelodeon is making a minor bad and a major bad mistake here.

The minor bad mistake is thinking that they can use an existing brand to introduce a variant brand - marketing types call this line extension, and it almost never works. Yes, Barbie introduced the world to Ken, and Coke introduced the world to Diet Coke. But does anyone remember Christie? How about Vanilla Coke? For every success here, there are fifty failures.

But that's the minor bad mistake - Nickelodeon is fixin' to flush a lot of investor cash down the toilet. Who cares?

The major bad mistake that they're making is that they risk damaging their existing brand (Dora). People are using terms like "slutty" and "skank" - it's pretty hard to see how this reinforces the brand. Boy, howdy.

In other words, they can take their existing - very profitable - brand and flush it down the toilet, too. Yes, Mattel is involved, but it's not their brand; they're just along for the ride as manufacturer and distributor. Nickelodeon (and parent Viacom) are the ones letting everything (ahem) hang out here.

This will sound harsh to any readers from Nickelodeon (in the unlikely event they find this blog post), but you can learn a lot from Disney. Nobody protects the brand like Disney.

The Science Fiction writer and TV screenwriter Harlan Ellison had a chapter about his experience working for Disney (in Stalking the Nightmare). He only worked there for a single day. From Snopes:

A few hours after arriving for his first day of work at Disney Studios, Ellison and several fellow writers headed off to the studio commissary for lunch. Once there, Ellison jokingly suggested they "do a Disney porn flick" and proceeded to act out the parts while imitating the voices of several animated Disney characters. Unbeknownst to him, Roy Disney and the other studio heads were sitting adjacent to his table.

Seems that when he got back from lunch, there was a pink slip on his desk. As he said in Stalking the Nightmare, Nobody f***s with the mouse.

So Nickelodeon, listen to your customers. They're telling you that you're being a pack of raving idiots. Lucky you - if they didn't care, you might not find out until it was too late.