Open letters are letters written to an individual, organization, corporation, or government agency that are published in a public forum, such as a newspaper, magazine, or Web site. Open letters often respond to an action taken or a decision made (or not made) by the recipient of the letter. Sometimes the letter writers are well-known authors or local (or national) figures; sometimes they’re representatives of an organization with a stake in an issue; and sometimes they are average citizens who want to voice their opinion on an issue that affects them.
When open letters are published in newspapers or magazines, they usually appear in the form of paid advertising or as public service announcements. They are also likely to reflect issues covered by the publication. Similarly, open letters published on the Web usually reflect the issues addressed by the Web site on which the letter appears, as is the case with “Our Letter to LEGO.”
The design of the letters is generally quite simple, usually consisting of a salutation (Dear …), one or more paragraphs of plain text, and the name of the writer or group (in place of a signature).
Letters are often brief, because of length limitations specified by the newspaper, magazine, journal, or Web site in which they appear, but many magazines and Web sites publish longer letters as well. Although brief letters typically provide little in the way of formal evidence to support an argument, longer letters might offer a thorough discussion that is carefully supported by evidence from personal experience, observation, interviews, and published sources.
SPARK
Our Letter to LEGO (Web site)
SPARK is an activist movement by and for girls. Motivated by academic research about the detrimental effects of the media’s sexualization of girls, SPARK works with girls and women ages 13–22 around the country to protest sexualized images of girls and images of violence toward women in the media. Among SPARK’s current projects are raising awareness about sexual assault on school campuses and objecting to unrealistic, airbrushed images of girls’ bodies and faces in teen magazines. This open letter to LEGO was accompanied by a petition urging the company not to stereotype girls in the newer models of its classic toy.
Posted by SPARKsummit on January 20th, 2012
We told you yesterday that we were taking this LEGO business to the next level—and here it is. Yesterday afternoon, LEGO received this letter from us along with a printout of all 47,000 signatures on our petition at the time of the writing. We’re proud of the conversation that we’ve started, and now we want to talk to LEGO directly. We’re looking forward to hearing from them, and we’ll keep you posted.
Dear Jorgen Vig Knudstorp (Chief Executive Officer, The Lego Group), Michael McNally (Brand Relations Director), Charlotte Simonsen (Head of Corporate Communications), and Mads Nipper (Executive Vice President):
We represent the girls, the parents, the children, the fans, the hobbyists, the collectors, the friends, the big sisters and brothers, the grandparents, and your future. And we are very disappointed. We used to believe in you. You used to create and market toys in line with your published mission to “inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.” We bought your blocks to build magical fortresses, castles, space ships, and fantasylands. We trusted you. Until last month, when you sold out our girls and started to blow away their future with little yellow, plastic hair dryers.
Your new Friends marketing campaign is not only insulting and condescending, but it is dangerous. As members of the SPARKTeam, girl activists (ages 13–22) from throughout North America fighting to end the sexualization of girls, we request a meeting between ourselves, representatives of SPARK partner organizations, and your marketing and executive team so that we can share the abundant scientific evidence published in peer-reviewed journals (not “market research,” designed to best target little girls and their moms as consumers) that demonstrates the negative impact sexist marketing campaigns like yours have on girls as they grow up and become young women. SPARK is a coalition of more than 70 orgs and reaches tens of thousands of girls and those who support their healthy development.
On December 22, we initiated a petition demanding that you include more girls in your marketing for all LEGO products. Over 47,000 people have signed, and more are signing every hour. Our concerns have been published and discussed to date in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Toronto Star, Today Show, NPR, the Huffington Post, and dozens of other radio shows, newspapers, and TV newscasts as well as in hundreds of blog posts. Millions of parents, girls, and boys, are listening to us and demanding that you reconsider your marketing approach. We fully understand that the trend in marketing is to sell a narrow, commercialized version of gender to younger and younger children. The pink and blue aisles of toy stores are testament to the success of this approach, as is the volume of toys with a teen edge marketed to very young girls. But we were surprised and dismayed when LEGO went this same route. Toys like LEGO have and should continue to open up creative options and give children a wide range of experiences, not shut these options down or channel them along the same narrow pathways other toy lines have done so effectively (Bratz dolls, for example). We expected more from you. We thought, given your mission and vision, that you actually gave girls more credit than that.
This is not about the color of your building blocks or your Friends’ line; it’s about the lack of faith you have in girls’ skills and interests. It’s about your distorted notion that, in order to buy LEGO, girls need messages about the value of shopping, clubbing, baking, and tanning. In your press release, you state that you have tried unsuccessfully to market to girls. This claim is not supported by your actions. In fact, you have offered relatively few female characters in your traditional LEGO sets, and there are rarely any girls in your commercials for those sets. You do not even showcase a girl playing with blocks on the cover of your Facebook page. The message, then, is very clear. To LEGO, there are boys and regular LEGOs. And then there are the “others”: the girls. This was never an effective marketing strategy for selling LEGOs to girls, and it is disingenuous to suggest that it was. That only 9% of regular LEGO users before the Friends line were girls is thus not surprising. You had stopped selling to girls.
You defend the new Friends line by saying girls “will enjoy the exact same building experience and developmental benefits as children who choose any other LEGO theme,” and yet you do not offer building instructions in your Friends catalog, as you do in the “regular” LEGO catalog. Instead you offer personalities and stories of Friends’ characters with overwhelmingly stereotypical interests. We are disappointed that in reaching out to girls with “story lines that they would find interesting,” you went for cafes, karaoke, makeovers, and lost puppies. There can be a time and place for more mundane story lines in imaginative play, but when you offer them as the “girl” alternative to active adventure stories, you are sending girls the message that they stay home, hang with friends, and make themselves pretty and nice, while boys go out and have fun and adventures. There is no evidence, of course, that this line will have “developmental benefits” and no mention of the negative developmental impact to girls of consuming a high volume of stereotypical messages you reinforce in your Friends’ line sets, for which there is substantial scientific evidence.
We think you can do better. We want you to remember that there are lots of girls not interested in sets that invite them to lounge poolside with drinks and sing in clubs. Take a look at the ones in our petition video—those are real girls. And thousands of parents, both moms and dads, who support their real girls agree. We are asking you to include more girls in your regular sets, more girls in your commercials, and we want your blocks marketed to girls and sold in the “girls aisles” of stores. We know LEGO can be that one company that offers girls the message that they have choices and we know LEGO has the will and creativity to encourage girls to start making their own choices.
We have included our petition and a printed list of the 47,427 people who stand with us. You have the opportunity to make a difference—to fulfill your mission. You wrote recently that, “We have a long history of listening very carefully to the opinions and requests of our consumers.” We look forward to our conversation. Please contact Dana Edell, SPARK’s Executive Director, at dana@SPARKsummit.com with potential dates and times for our meeting.
Respectfully,
Stephanie Cole and Bailey Shoemaker Richards, SPARKTeam representatives, with
Dana Edell, Ph.D., SPARK Director
Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D., SPARK Co-Founder
Deborah Tolman, Ed.D., SPARK Co-Founder
Source: sparksummit.com/2012/01/20/our-letter-to-lego/
In the text boxes below, examine the strategies the authors use to present their argument by responding to the following questions: