Not “berry nice”: Marketing Strawberry Shortcake to Girls in the ’80s

By Natalie Coulter

Growing up in suburban Canada in the 1980s, my sister and I loved Strawberry Shortcake. We watched the show every Saturday morning, we asked for the strawberry scented doll and all her “berry nice friends” for our birthday presents. In our shared bedroom we had a Strawberry shaped doll house and a box full of colourful outfits for her desert named friends such as Apple Dumplin’, Orange Blossom and Huckleberry Pie. We had a Strawberry Shortcake board game and we even wore Strawberry Shortcake Underoos underneath our Toughskin jeans.

With the lens of being a scholar in the field of children’s consumer culture, I look back on this moment and recognize it for the radical neoliberal shift in consumer culture that it was. I also think about the deep entanglements between children’s toys and media, and the massive proliferation of consumer culture that has taken place since the 1980s. One of my favourite scholarly quotes that I return to often is Dan Cook’s statement that “children’s culture makes capitalism hum over the long haul.” When I look at Strawberry Shortcake during the 1980s, this statement is revealed to be true.

Strawberry Shortcake stated as a greeting card character in the late 1970s, originally designed by Barbi Sargent a contracted freelancer working for American Greetings, the card company. In 1979 she was developed into a toy franchise by the toy and licencing division of AG Those Characters From Cleveland (TCFC), that also produced Holly Hobbie and later the Care Bears. TCFC, and its parent company American Greetings, along with a partner company toy manufacturer Kenner Products were at the forefront of toy franchises. Strawberry quickly become America’s number one selling toy doll and appeared on hundreds of products selling more than $1 billion U.S. worth of merchandise by the time she was four years old (Englehardt, 1986). The development and rise of Strawberry Shortcake in the 1980s encapsulates the dramatic shifts in the landscape of the children’s media and entertainment (CME) industry in the 1980s.

Strawberry Shortcake’s rise is in direct response to policy change in the US. Under the direction of Ronald Regan, the government relaxed many of the laws that regulated children’s media content stating that the government didn’t have the authority to operate as “National nannies”. We can see the deep neoliberalism here, the offloading of governmental regulation and corporate responsibility onto individuals. But what this meant was that a television show could feature characters that were also in commercials.

To explain this a bit, before 1984 the distinction between marketing and TV content had to be completely separate. This is why all of the old cereal characters such as Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam, are only in the advertisements for the cereal. Cereal companies created characters that were only used in the marketing for the cereal because they could not appear anywhere else.  But now, with the new legislation TV characters could also be in advertisements, which meant that Strawberry Shortcake could both be on a TV show, and in an advertisement for the Strawberry Shortcake toy line.

This change had many radical implications on the children’s media, but what it effectively meant was the children’s TV shows could (and would) basically become 22 minute advertisements for the character licensing. In the business of children’s media this has come to be called IP’s, short for intellectual properties.

The impact of this was that it made the girls market worth it. Prior to this deregulation a show’s value was based on the size of the audience in order to garner high ratings. It was a common assumption at the time that girls would watch shows that catered to boys, but boys wouldn’t watch shows cater to girls. So very few shows centred on a girl audience. But with the shift to licensed merchandising being the value of the show, lucrative audiences were ones that would buy a lot of the merchandising, not the size of the ratings. The girl audience was now a viable audience to cater to as well. This also meant that TV shows were created based on the merchandise opportunities as opposed to being driven by a story. For example, shows with lots of characters, so kids would want to collect all the characters – often asking for them as birthday presents – became common. But this obviously sets the stage for the long running and wide reaching character franchises that we see in the entertainment world today. The DC and Marvel franchises immediately come to mind.

This moment is part of the intensification of market segmentation that occurred in the 1980s particularly as the children’s market is fractured into smaller factions such as the teen market, the tween market, the tween girl market, the toddler marke etc, which would offer more intense marketing opportunities. Changing focuses from creating shows based solely on ratings, to developing television content that addresses niche audiences based on their ability to purchase products. Strawberry Shortcake is a perfect example of an ideological shift in which children are naturalized as consumers and markets. Before fully developing the line of Strawberry Shortcake dolls and the television show, TCFC undertook extensive amounts of research in order to understand the girl. But this research was market research. The girl is “understood” purely in market terms, not as a citizen with collective needs and desires, not a complex heterogenous category with diverse experiences of girlhood based on class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc. But instead as a consumer, assumed to be a white, middle class, able bodied, heterosexual girl, whose value is based on her ability to purchase products.

The last thing that Strawberry encapsulates in the 1980s is the deep expansion of commercial culture. First, licensed items such as a Strawberry Shortcake lunch box reveal a broader shift in manufacturing. TCFC doesn’t own the lunch box factory, nor is the value of the company in the production of the merchandise. TCFC’s value comes from the fact that it owns the idea, the intellectual property of Strawberry Shortcake. Whatever company can produce the lunch box for the cheapest and give the greatest return on the licensing becomes the company that produces the lunchbox. This shift in production is the basis for the proliferation of a global economy based on the exploitation of cheap labour overseas and the value being held by western corporations who own the brand as an idea. Secondly, the lunch box reminds us of how planned obsolesce is baked right into these products. The Strawberry Shortcake lunch box quickly becomes obsolete to the 8 year old girl who outgrows Strawberry because it is “too baby”. That lunchbox can’t be passed on to her brother either because it’s “too girly”. The old lunch box is discarded as it’s obsolete (not broken, it still works) but it no longer serves its purpose and a new, more “grown up” lunch box is purchased.

Reflecting on this moment, the 1980s, in which Strawberry Shortcake took over our bedroom (and lunches), as well as the bedrooms (and lunches) of many white middle class Canadian girls, is more than a nostalgic journey through my childhood. It is also a moment that encapsulates the confluence of many neoliberal tendencies of the CME that have continued to keep capitalism humming; the expansion of consumer culture into girls lives, the centring: of the commercial logics of franchises at the basis of media culture, the naturalization of young people as consumers, a deepening of consumer culture and the exploitation of global labour. Strawberry doesn’t seem to be such a sweet smelling, “berry nice” character anymore.

More on Strawberry Shortcake, Children, and Marketing

Daniel Thomas Cook. (2001), “Lunchbox Hegemony? Kids & the Marketplace, Then & Now,” Alternet, August 20, 2001.
Natalie Coulter. Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market. Mediated Youth Series. Peter Lang: New York, 2014.
Tom Englehardt. “The Strawberry Shortcake Strategy,” in Todd Gitlin (Ed.) Watching Television (pp. 68–110). New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Kline, Stephen Kline. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. London, England: Verso, 1993.
Ellen Seiter. Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

About the Author

Natalie Coulter is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Digital Literacies (IRDL) at York University, Canada. Her research explores the promotional ecologies of children’s media and entertainment. She is co-editor of Youth Mediations and Affective Relations, with Susan Driver (2019, Palgrave Macmillan) and author of Tweening the Girl (2014, Peter Lang). She has been published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Girlhood Studies and the Journal of Children and Media and is a founding member of the Association for Research on the Cultures of Young People (ARCYP).

Cite this article as: Natalie Coulter, “Not ‘berry nice’: Marketing Strawberry Shortcake to Girls in the ’80s” in Changing Childhoods, 12 January 2021, https://changingchildhoods.com/marketing-strawberry-shortcake-to-girls-in-the-80s