Does GoldieBlox really escape from gendered toys?
I was amused by Forbe's article on GoldieBlox winning a superbowl ad. What do you find there?
Sklar sees the huge success of GoldieBlox this past year as representative of a greater movement away from gendered toys — that is, blue building blocks for boys and pretty princesses for girls. She hopes this unprecedented exposure during the Super Bowl will help speed the demise of the pink aisle.
The funny thing is that GoldieBlox - in addition to basically copying TinkerToy pieces - actually seems to be genderizing the TinkerToy marketing campaign. Take a look at the current lineup of TinkerToy products - one shows up in a pink box with a girl on the front but about half of their product lineup seems to feature girls on the front of a non-genderified box - see this one for example. In other words you'd be hard-pressed to find a less-gendered toy advertising campaign.
Far from escaping genderized toys, GoldieBlox seems to fair significantly worse than the existing type of toy it seems to more or less be cloning. One manufacturer has 100% girls on the front of boxes, the other shows around 40% girls in their current lineup. In other words, feminism seems to remain a good marketing strategy with a fairly loose relation to reality.