• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 3, 2015

Mattel yesterday not only named chairman and interim CEO Christopher Sinclair as its permanent — at least for the nonce — CEO, it also elevated chief brands officer Richard Dickson to COO, a move that Barbie might have good things to say about if she could talk. Oh wait, she can. (More about that later.)

Dickson “had led a revival of the Barbie brand before leaving for a top job at apparel company Jones Group Inc. in 2010,” write Joann S. Lublin and Paul Ziobro in the Wall Street Journal. 

He had worked at Mattel, which is based in El Segundo, Calif., for about a decade “overseeing a variety of product lines, marketing and packaging,” reports Bloomberg’s Matt Townsend, adding that yesterday’s promotion was his second since he retuned to Mattel last May.

“Now he’s filling out his resume with experience in operations, a sign that the 47-year-old could be getting groomed to become the next CEO after the 64-year-old Sinclair,” Townsend writes. 

Reuters’ Yashaswini Swamynathan observes that “analysts say the reins could eventually be passed on” to Dickson, after quoting a disappointed B. Riley & Co analyst Linda Weiser.

“We were hoping a search would be conducted for a ‘rock star’ CEO with global branded consumer products experience, who could lead Mattel for the next five to 10 years,” Weiser wrote in a note.

But Dickson may be that rock star in a more formative stage.

“Mr. Dickson has quickly left his mark on Mattel in his short time back,” write Lublin and Ziobro. “Last year, he reorganized the creative team and put the largest toy brands into separate business units. He has also created a division called the Toy Box that has more leeway to take risks and develop toys the way a startup would.”

Two new products — “a modern version of the View-Master that incorporates virtual-reality technology from Google and Hello Barbie, an interconnected version of the doll that understands and responds to speech” — are seen as products of Dickson’s efforts to work faster and incorporate technology into the toymaker’s products, Lublin and Ziobro point out.

As for Sinclair, he has been on the Mattel board for about 19 years and was a former executive at PepsiCo, the AP reports. He will remain chairman.

“The company has seen sales lag lately and had an especially bad holiday season last year. Meanwhile, Mattel’s stock has fallen by more than 40% over the past year, and earlier this week saw its market cap slip below that of rival Hasbro,” reports Carol Lawrence in the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Sinclair replaced Bryan Stockton, who resigned earlier this year after a couple of disastrous years at the helm.

“Since stepping in as interim CEO in January, Chris has been extremely active inside the company, developing with the board and the Mattel management team a comprehensive plan to improve the company’s performance and make the most of our incredible brands and opportunities,” Michael J. Dolan, Mattel’s independent lead director says in a release announcing the appointment. “He is moving with urgency and we are delighted that, with his agreement to sign on as CEO and continue to lead the effort personally, there will not be any delay in implementing the changes necessary to get Mattel back on track.”

That apparently includes layoffs, as 107 people lost their jobs across corporate functions at Mattel headquarters yesterday, Shan Li reports in the Los Angeles Times. 

“We determined that these reductions were necessary to ensure that our workforce is aligned with our business goals and objectives,” spokesman Alex Clark tells Li in an email.

Meanwhile, Sinclair and Dickson have a PR crisis brewing over Hello Barbie, who is set to make her debut this fall. She already has raised the ire of privacy and children’s advocates, and headlines about the controversy have been fond of using the word “creepy.”

“If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child's intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analyzed,” Angela Campbell, faculty adviser at Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology, says in a statement reported by Sarah Halzack in the Washington Post.

“Kids using Hello Barbie aren't only talking to a doll,” says Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Mashable’s Elif Koc reports. “They are talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose only interest in them is financial.”

Hello Barbie uses a Wi-Fi enabled technology developed by ToyTalk, whose CEO, Oren Jacob, told the New York Times’ Natasha Singer last week that “to converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today.”

“‘She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,’ Mr. Jacob says of Barbie,” Singer writes. “‘We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”’

If only she could predict her own future.