Scrabble-Rousers!

Posted by JR Buchbinder on August 1 at 1:12 PM
Toy company Hasbro is under attack. Hundreds of thousands of malicious emails. Vicious, stinging blog posts. Vitriolic hell-bent hackers. Yes, the company known for its fun family games and entertainments is being beaten down worse than a Whack-A-Mole. And it's all because of... Scrabble?

A Brief History:
When I first signed on to Facebook, I found it to be much like MySpace: a whole lot of profiles and a whole lot of nothing to do. But then the FaceFolks opened the doors of the site to application developers.

As I lamented in a previous post, I was then kicked by pirates, compared to Disney Princesses (I still say I'm Belle - she's the one who was always reading!), and sent ceramic pots that would grow strange plants shaped like shoes over a span of four days. AKA: A whole lot of useless junk.

But then, a beacon of light (not to be confused with the ill-fated Facebook Beacon... I know, low blow). It was called Scrabulous, and it was good. Suddenly I had something to distract me at work (this was my old job, I can admit my Scrabulous playing openly here). I could play Scrabble against my friends. It was quick and easy and fun as heck. But why was it called Scrabulous? Wasn't it just Scrabble?

Well, turns out it wasn't Scrabble. It was just the Scrabble game, sans trademark, turned into a Facebook application by two brothers in Calcutta. Of course, none of my friends cared about this. In fact, a bunch of us actually bought the real physical Scrabble game at stores because Scrabulous reconnected us to the fun we used to have with the game. Scrabulous helped a younger generation rediscover Scrabble.

But then...
Trouble began to brew. Hasbro the company that owns the rights to Scrabble raised a stink. Copyright infringement! We created Scrabble! We own the trademark!

AKA: We can't believe we sat on this opportunity and didn't develop a free online application first and never figured out a way to monetize it.

All us Scrabulous fans heard of the tumult, but we ignored it. Hasbro would bellyache and then get over it. It's not like Scrabble board sales were declining. It was still a great game for social events with verbose individuals.

But just this week, something happened.

The trubble with Scrabble
Hasbro threatened a massive lawsuit and the brothers from Calcutta yanked it down. How silly. It's as if Hasbro is so mired in their physical non-web world that they didn't see the backlash coming. What harm was Scrabulous doing? None. It was greed and an old-fashioned dependency on trademark. In the world of the Internet there are two choices:

1. Create a strong, meaningful brand (or branding experience, as Rowland would call it). Raise it. Teach it well. And then set it free into the world to be YouTubed, Del.Icio.Us'ed, Flickrd, Twittered, etc. It will bring back more than you thought.

or

2. Be a fuddy duddy and chase after all who latch onto your brand. Force them to abandon their better idea that trumped yours.

Hasbro went with number 2, and they are feeling the pain. What's even funnier? The brothers from Calcutta have won two-fold:

First victory: Hundreds of thousands of angry web users are lashing out at Hasbro. Negative word of mouth is spreading like a California wildfire.

Second victory: The brothers just launched a different-enough version of Scrabulous, called "WordScraper"  on Facebook today.


This is so smart it makes me grin. It's a tamer version of that movie moment when it seems like the big, bad villain is going to push our hero off a speeding train just as that tree pops up over the horizon and knocks the villain into an abyss.

The Scrabulous Boys knew what was going on and dragged out the media and attention while they made a few cosmetic revisions to the game - circles instead of square tiles - a new name - changeable point multipliers. Hasbro's pain is only just getting started, and the brothers' pleasure just got a quadruple word score.

Learnings for All of Us
Dear companies, please understand the following truths:

1. You do not own the web - everyone does.
2. You need to play on the Web if you want to succeed in today's marketplace.
3. If you play on the Web, you no longer own your brand. It will be downloaded. Animated. Tattooed on bodies. Manipulated and lampooned.
4. This is not a bad thing - it fosters deeper relationships with your brand.
5. You cannot win. If you bring in the lawyers and cause a ruckus you will ALWAYS be seen as the bad guy.

So let go and let Net, okay? Let Hasbro's pain be our professor. If it isn't actually hurting your business (and it shouldn't be) then just let it live. The slight hit you took is nothing compared to the sting from the backlash you'd create. Topics: branding, interactive        SHARE: