Because of Barbie’s epic return to fame, sellers on resale sites took advantage of her popularity and massively inflated the prices of everything tangentially related: pre-owned vintage dolls, hard-to-get accessories, and yes, even used Barbie Dream Cars (toy cars), too. CarBravo, a year-old challenger brand in the immensely competitive US used car market, saw this as an opportunity to extend its commitment to fair and honest pricing beyond the human-size used car lot and into the toy-size used Barbie Dream Car shopping experience, too.

With a modest budget, we bought a fleet of used Barbie toy cars at overinflated prices and sold them to true Barbie fans at fair, honest prices. Each under 20 bucks (with free shipping) and available on our Shopify commerce store designed to mirror our real CarBravo.com experience.

Fans could filter toy car searches by make, style, and color. Just like our real-life cars.

Using only our owned social channels and targeted emails, we got the word out. A strict one-toy-car-per-address purchase limit ensured Barbie fans got the used car of their dreams.

With each delivery, custom QR codes connected every toy car to listings of the same or similar real-life vehicles on CarBravo.com.

Results: sold-out Barbie inventory. Each toy car listing led to 12X the views of real cars on CarBravo.com. $2.3 million in real used vehicles sold to Barbie email recipients (74 sold). CarBravo’s best sales month ever.

As a new national brand in the hypercompetitive US used car market, CarBravo needs to find ways to stand out from the established brands with much bigger budgets.

CarBravo is dedicated to providing fair and honest prices on every used vehicle. So when we saw people completely cashing in on the moment and selling overpriced used Barbie Dream Cars, we had to do what’s right for used car shoppers and buyers everywhere. Yes, even for used plastic toy ones.

Our targeted email blast using our investment in Acxiom 3rd-party data and social posts on our own social channels reached both used car buyers and toy enthusiasts. This helped ensure the right people could get their used Barbie toy car and help us create new awareness (and even more appreciation) for CarBravo and its fair and honest pricing for its used real-size cars, too.

After getting buy-in from our client, our lawyers, and Mattel, we decided to use a considerable share of our modest $25,000 budget to purchase as many over-priced used Barbie Dream toy cars as we could.

As our used toy car inventory grew, we tracked, photographed, and created vehicle descriptions just as we would with our real-size inventory.

To create our used Barbie Dream Car marketplace, we invested in Shopify, a cloud-based commerce solution to design an online store that mirrored our real CarBravo.com experience. Fans could filter toy car searches by make, style, and color. Just like our real-life cars.

We relied entirely on our owned social channels and targeted emails to spread the word.

With each free-shipping delivery, a thank-you card in our packaging featured a custom QR code that directly linked to real used cars listings on CarBravo.com that matched (or closely matched) their used Barbie toy car.

With our modest all-in budget of less than $25,000, and with no media dollars invested, our entire used Barbie Dream Car (toy cars) inventory sold out.

Our organic social posts saw 3X our normal engagement level compared to the prior 3-month average.*

Each used toy car listing led to 12X views of used real-life vehicles on CarBravo.com.**

$2.3 million in real used cars were sold to people who received our email announcing Used Barbie toy cars. (74 sold x average sale price of $32,000).***

All of which helped CarBravo have its best vehicle sales month ever.****

*Khoros Analytics

**Adobe Analytics

***Acxiom Used Vehicles Sales Match Report

****Monthly Certified Used Vehicle Sales Report