Pi-Consulting

We should remind ourselves that a significant number of high-spending consumers (though it’s not actually their money) are a lot younger than us. Mere children, in fact.

The Consumer Insight column looks at the headline above, and winces. Today, Maurice Chevalier’s lyric from the 1951 musical Gigi! resonates with a decidedly queasy tone. Back then no-one much imagined a culture that could produce pouting Bratz dolls and catwalk-ready six-year-olds.

Nonetheless, at least one company that caters to juvenile consumer appetites has reason to “thank Heaven for little girls”. Then again, maybe their thanks should go to Andy Mooney, for his intuitive understanding of what makes girl-children squeal with delight and tug their mothers’ sleeves.

Mr. Mooney was the former Nike manager who was brought in seven years ago to rescue Disney Consumer Products, where sales were slipping by 30% a year. He arrived with a magic wand in his pocket. A month into his new job, he went to a “Disney On Ice” show, and noticed long entrance lines of small girls, all dressed up in thrown-together ‘princess’ costumes. Mooney thought this looked like latent demand, and briefed his production and marketing team with a swatch of colours and a sheaf of draft license agreements. “We’re going to help these little girls to do what they’re doing anyway”, said the sport-shoe seer. “To project themselves into characters from our classic movies”.

The idea took wing, and suddenly Snow White, the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella were wearing Pantone Pink #241 and gilded tiaras. Disney broke its oldest rule, and started marketing characters separately from its hitherto sacrosanct film-release cycle. “Princess” had no explicit marketing plan, no focus group research, virtually no advertising. “We just started giving little girls what they wanted, though at the time I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this”, Mooney later modestly admitted.

It worked like magic. In 2000, Disney packaged a product range identified with nine “princess” characters from the Disney movie stable. By 2001, the take was already standing at an impressive $300 million. In 2006, global sales flounced past the $3 billion mark. There are now over 25,000 different Disney Princess (DP) items. DP pens, crayons and secret diaries jostle for space with DP bed-linen, DP band-aids and DP lip balm. “Princess” has become the fastest-growing ‘brand’ in Disney history.

Nothing else on earth comes even close, though Mattel immediately responded with a Princess Barbie doll range. Not to be outdone, a Chicago-based company, Club Libby Lu, launched pink “Princess Phones” covered in fake fur, for girls to invite each other to branded “Princess Makeover Birthday Parties”. Saks Fifth Avenue snapped up the fledgling company for $12 million, and have already driven sales to $50 million a year.

“Princess” changed what little girls aspired to. Spunky, tomboyish gals like Lara Croft the Tomb Raider and grubby-kneed Dora the Explorer have been swept aside in a tidal wave of cutie-pie pink. Even tough-girl Disney characters like Pocahontas and Mulan have been pressed into service as supernumerary princesses, obliged to join the girlie-culture by wearing regal feminine garb like the rest. The trend may echo the troubled times we live in. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s original “Little Princess” book appeared in a painful period of industrial upheaval and urbanization. The Shirley Temple version comforted those hit by the Great Depression.

Disney gets asked by socially-aware mothers whether princesses don’t represent a historic leap backwards in terms of female role models. They point to an absence of studies indicating that playing at princesses squashes girls’ aspirations or harms their self-esteem. Nonetheless, critics cite a recent slump in US schoolgirls’ participation in sport, with athletics now widely seen as ‘unfeminine’. In a 2006 survey from Girls Inc., school-age girls felt overwhelming “pressure to be perfect… to please everyone, be very thin and dress right”. Pressure to conform has always been strong among young Americans. Says Lyn Brown, a writer and professor of education, “There’s an illusion of more choice out there for girls, but their choices are steadily narrowing”. Peggy Orenstein, a writer who has analyzed the princess phenomenon, says “Try buying your daughter something that isn’t pink”. (It was not always so. Half a century ago the ‘feminine’ colour was blue. Remember all those Dorothies in blue Gingham? And the Sleeping Beauty in shades of Forget-Me-Not?)

So, is ‘Princess’ forever? The pink tide may not be irreversible, and Disney are hedging the bet. This year they launch a follow-up to ride the next socio-cultural wave among under-tens. Tinker Bell and the Disney Fairies have sassier attitudes than most princesses, and they’re coming to a little girl’s bedroom near you. In 2007, look out for shades of lavender, turquoise and peppermint green. $400 million in existing sales says Tink could be the next big thing.