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Hasbro
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In the early 1980s Hasbro was the nation's sixth best-selling toy maker, with revenues of $225.4 million and $15.2 million in profits. Flush with newfound strength, in 1984 it acquired Milton Bradley, the nation's fifth best-selling toy maker, and second only to General Mills's Parker Brothers subsidiary in production of board games and puzzles. Milton Bradley had been founded by a Springfield, Massachusetts, lithographer who set up shop in 1860 and immediately turned out a popular reproduction of a portrait of presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. Bradley's portrait... showed Lincoln clean-shaven, so when Lincoln grew his beard, sales fell off. Looking for a way to stay in business, Bradley invented and produced a board game called The Checkered Game of Life, a distant precursor of a popular Milton Bradley game, The Game of Life, which was introduced in 1960. The game's success convinced Bradley to stay in the game business.
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Many have fond childhood memories of playing with the classic Hasbro toy Lite-Brite, but 26 year-old artist Mark Beekman isn't ready to let those memories fade. Beekman recently completed his year-long project of creating the "World's Largest Lite-Brite." Measuring approximately 5 feet tall by 10 feet wide, over 125,000 original Lite-Brite pegs were used to recreate a 1:9 scale of Leonardo DaVincias "Last Supper."
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Hasbro has created The Naked Brothers Band: North American Tour Game (SRP: $14.99), for a brand-new way to play along with the band. Kids are on the move trying to catch up to the band as they go on their North American Tour and prove they are the ultimate fan. Players criss-cross North America on a tour bus collecting tickets to all the concerts, and scoring points in an effort to win the best seats possible. Watch out for the pitfalls along the way, as well as other fans who want your tickets!
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Hasbro, Morris said, has a strong faith in brand awareness for the venerable game companies -- Milton Bradley has been publishing games since the 1860s, while Parker Brothers emerged in the 1880s. Together, they account for many of the most popular American board games of all time. "When you ask consumers what names of game companies they know, they know two right off the bat -- Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers," Morris said.
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The feud was resolved in 1980, when Hasbro spun off Empire Pencil, which had become the nation's largest pencil maker, and Harold exchanged his Hasbro shares for shares of the new company. At the same time, Stephen Hassenfeld became the toy company's CEO and chairman of the board, and dedicated himself to turning Hasbro around. Where it had once been overextended, the company slashed its product line by one-third between 1978 and 1981, while its annual number of new products was cut by one-half. Hasbro ... refocused on simpler toys, such as Mr. Potato Head--products that were inexpensive to make, could be sold at lower prices, and had longer life cycles. This conservative philosophy precluded Hasbro from entering the hot new field of electronic games, as did the fact that it could not spare the cash to develop such toys. The decision to stay out of the market was vindicated in the early 1980s when the electronics boom turned bust and shook out many competitors.
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Hasbro deserves it full share for creating Scrabble, but instead of suing the developers that created the new media clone, it should thank them for innovating when the company couldn’t. By striking a deal or buying out the creators of Scrabulous, Hasbro could ride a wave of online popularity and reach new customers without risk. Hasbro could then use the online version to market the offline game or add premium features that would allow them to charge micro-payments (How about $1.99 a month for customized tiles, or personalized leaderboards). The platform is there, the customers are there, so why not plug in, instead of shutting it all down?
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