The Rise and Fall of Beanie Babies
If you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, Beanie Babies are small, understuffed furry toys that come with a birthdate, a poem, a $6 price tag and a saccharine-filled name like ‘Inky the Octopus’ or ‘Freckles the Leopard’.
First introduced in 1993, their sales in the first few years were so modest that the manufacturer, TY Inc., decided to phase them out. But in 1996, they sold ten times as many products as they did the year before, and they repeated the same 1000% growth in 1997. By 1998, TY was the most successful toy manufacturer in the world and by 2004 the founder had a personal fortune of $6bn. Other companies benefited from the Beanie Baby meme as well - toy trading fuelled eBay’s early growth (with toys trading at up to 100 times purchase price), they were sold at a discount with McDonalds meals, and a magazine/price guide that sold 650,000 copies a month.
They were cheap, cute and loved by large numbers of children and adults. Customers formed a strong relationship with the brand - they went back to buy more, and so did their friends. The distribution strategy, selling through small stores rather than mega-chains like Toys R Us and Wal-Mart, meant that it became hard to buy the full collection. TY would also change the colour of products or announce the ‘retirement’ of characters to keep the demand up. The craze was such that the police department in Kankakee, Illinois ran a successful ‘Guns for Beanies’ campaign, swapping bags of toys for illegal weapons held by gang members.
In 2000, Professors Charles Martin and Rebecca Morris published a study on the growth of Beanie Babies. - they attributed the success of the brand to a combination of nostalgic value, personification (i.e. the critters were perceived as having their own ‘personalities’), uniqueness, facilitation, emotional involvement, aesthetic appeal, quality/excellence, the generation of positives associations, social factors (owning them implies a certain ‘niceness’) and low price.
I want to make it clear here that the toys themselves are not the meme any more than my brown eyes are my genes: the meme here is the collection of Beanie Babies. So, as an interesting test of memetics, let’s see if we can assess the growth of Beanie Babies against Heylighen’s criteria, as modified by me:
Objective criteria. the toys are distinctive and clearly labelled, and we were certainly exposed to them frequently: during the height of the craze you couldn’t move for the wretched things. They also pass the interactive test - you could pose them in various positions, making them more interesting than (say) the contemporaneous craze for ‘Pet Rocks’;
Subjective criteria:the manufacturer took steps (introducing new characters and retiring popular ones) to ensure that the novelty was retained and restricted numbers to induce unfulfilled demand. The meme (and the products) are simple, and buying new Beanie Babies is coherent with having bought them in the past. As the toys are benign and inoffensive their ownership is coherent with other beliefs. The only test they would appear to fail here is usefulness, until you consider their low initial cost and the apparent investment potential of owning them;
Group criteria: we know that the craze initially passed from friend to friend. As the number of people in your peer-group who owned the toys increased, so you would be pressured to own them too as this is the sort of thing that ‘people like us’ people do. The meme is easy to transmit and was widely publicised (e.g. by the magazine and by McDonalds);
Memeplex criteria: finally, we get to the filters that test how well ownership sits with other memes. The toys invoke warm positive associations - they are cuddly, kids love them, and Martin and Morris believe they invoke nostalgia for our own childhoods: doubtless some people even formed emotional attachments with their toys. Beanie Baby ownership is unlikely to offend any currently-installed religious or political memeplex, and the craze is self-reinforcing in that once you have started to collect them there is a strong urge to continue.
So I think that collection of Beanie Babies can be explained pretty well by memetic criteria. What is not explained here is why the craze took off but then stopped before every single member of the human race owned the full set. Firstly, not every single member of the human race would adopt the collection meme - many would fight it (because the feeling triggered would be nausea rather than whimsy) and many more would not have the disposable income. The potential population for the meme is therefore large but finite and it would saturate once most of the potential converts had collected the full set. And once again, the meme is not ownership of Beanie Babies but their collection. So as sales started to fall and McDonalds abandoned their promotion, the meme would stop spreading and then defection would take its toll - I suspect that no longer collecting Beanie Babies is a trapping state, meaning that the number of people still running the collecting meme would fall from a high number to a very low one in a short timescale.
So the growth of Beanie Babies was initially quite dramatic, indicating that the ownership of Beanie Babies was pretty infectious, but eventually the adoption percentage fell below the defection percentage and the craze inevitably died out. As I write this, there are more than 77,000 lots for sale on eBay containing Beanie Babies at a few dollars, some of which are collections of several hundred toys. It’s a real bitch when the defection percentages turn against you.