With its brands having become household names in the toy industry, Mattel has garnered an important place in the history of the global market. Among the key brands that make Mattel a world-renowned corporation, one should mention Barbie, Hot Wheels, Max Steel, and Polly Pocket. The risks that Mattel takes when obtaining the rights to other properties such as Harry Potter merchandise are significant, yet the company has kept its success streak going for quite a while.
Nevertheless, Mattel has faced some challenges, the most recent being a massive toy recall caused by quality issues in the company’s final product. The fact that the major recall became necessary when two mistakes by the firm were conflated into one major error put Mattel into a rather unfavorable light in the global market. In each case, the issue concerned a significant threat to children’s health, the first one involving lead, which has long been a known hazard. This shows that Mattel could use better quality management and an improved approach to acquiring, processing, and transferring data.
However, much to the company’s credit, Mattel managed to handle the situation adroitly by introducing a new approach toward the crisis that the firm was experiencing. The resulting change in the overall framework for monitoring quality and its strategy for communicating with its customers showed that the organization was ready to redesign its core philosophy toward a more people-focused and ethically unambiguous framework. The choice to enhance the quality management process can be seen as an important step toward restoring the company’s public image and a decision to provide high-quality services to its customers.
The current approach toward making amends that Mattel has been following, however, could use some improvements. The idea that mistakes will be made even in the best of circumstances and in the most professional of settings can be regarded as questionable given the type of threat to which Mattel subjected its customers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended for the company to alter its current approach toward public relations and especially communication with customers, as well as the framework for handling ethical issues in general. The lack of direction that can at present be observed at Mattel concerning its ethical stance is rather disturbing since it may lead to the further deterioration of relationships between Mattel and its customers.
It is strongly recommended that Mattel should reconsider its current framework for handling ethical issues. While maintaining corporate integrity and preventing further instances of mismanagement in general and mitigating quality concerns in particular is essential for Mattel, it is also essential for the organization to meet the high standards that it sets without fail. For this purpose, apart from changing the current strategy for managing communications with its customers and revisiting its ethical principles, Mattel should also explore additional strategies for keeping the quality of its services and products consistent, such as adopting a philosophy of continuous improvement as the foundation for carrying out not only production processes but also tasks at every level.