The American Girl brand is, well, all-American. The dolls all come with their own stories, some tied to pivotal moments in American history, and the brand aims to instill “confidence, character, and courage” in young girls, according to Jamie Cygielman, president of American Girl. Inspiring its target audience to learn and be the best version of themselves? Very wholesome!
But if its TikTok account is any indication, the beloved doll and book brand isn’t afraid to embrace some slightly less squeaky-clean internet humor—and its audience isn’t just young girls.
Take, for example, one of its most popular recent videos: The anthropomorphized dolls take part in a trend where participants share traumatic stories before dumping their candy of choice into a large salad bowl, with Kit, Josefina, Molly, and Kirsten cheerfully sharing their own trauma, like living through the Great Depression or having their house burned down by a pet raccoon.
While the video is careful not to make light of the dolls’ backstories, participating in the trend calls back to the ways some fans have discussed American Girl doll stories online. Older fans often joke about how brutal some of the dolls’ backgrounds are, which they only realized as they’ve grown up alongside the brand. The growing retrospection from older fans has even gone so far as to inspire an SNL sketch.
Keeping up with that grown-up sentiment is key to how American Girl shows up online. “The overall goal of anything that we do within social in general is really to use our organic social to drive brand relatability with our audience,” Cygielman told Marketing Brew.
A three-audience approach
American Girl has been on TikTok since 2022, but the brand started taking a more trend-based approach in the last year The platform-native strategy, Cygielman said, is one prong of the brand’s three pillars on social media: nostalgia, girlhood, and cultural relevancy.
“For us, it’s about engagement, both off-channel engagement as well as leaning into some pop culture, and memes often come out of that,” Cygielman said. “And then there’s some of the videos that we want more shareability out of, a lot of things [focusing on] how to’s or storytelling, etc. We sort of balance between all of these different pillars.”
That balance has brought the brand some results. Over the past year, engagement has grown 10% across all social platforms, with TikTok-specific engagement clocking a 91% increase, while the brand’s follower count on TikTok and Instagram has grown by 5% and 8%, respectively, according to the company.
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Across platforms, American Girl aims to serve three audiences. Cygielman said the brand’s core audience is girls ages three to 10 who are interested in owning and playing with the dolls, but it also targets millennial moms, who might have once owned American Girl dolls and are now purchasing for their children, as well as Gen Z, “who maybe more recently came out of girlhood” themselves.
Those three audiences inform the type of content that appears on the brand’s TikTok and other social media. “TikTok is obviously geared more towards the adult fan and just kind of spreading the word about American Girl,” Cygielman said. “And as we continue to build out more lifestyle products that are targeted for that consumer base, reaching the younger consumer will obviously focus more with YouTube and some of these other mediums.”
While Cygielgman recognizes that TikTok is a Gen Z-heavy platform, American Girl doesn’t only post trends and memes on its account. A scroll through the page reveals sassy humor, inspirational stories, influencer visits, and behind-the-scenes videos that show the making of some of its more ambitious concepts.
“We have an ambassador program, so we’ve got a bunch of mom influencers and family influencers, and just the content that they create, which is all really first-party…it’s really authentic, and that has driven just a lot of engagement and I think it’s driving more people to come visit the stores,” Cygielman said.
Appropriate entertainment
Watching American Girl’s TikTok content will inevitably garner some giggles, but it’s a far cry from the “unhinged” tone that’s become more commonplace on some brand social media accounts.
“We clearly are looking at what’s trending in social, what people are sharing, where there’s definitely fan passion. And we want to make sure that, if it’s appropriate for our brand, that we can lean into it,” Cygielman said. “The appropriate [part] is important, because we are still very much a brand for families and so good, clean, fun, funny culture always tends to work.”
Instead, keeping storytelling front-and-center is a way to reflect the brand’s core ethos while fitting in on video-heavy social platforms.
“We’ve always been natural storytellers,” Cygielman said, “so I think the video medium with TikTok or Instagram Reels or any of these other social formats lends itself particularly well to our brand DNA.”