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Why Hasbro doesn’t deserve customer loyalty

The whole kerfuffle around Hasbro forcing Facebook to shut down Scrabulous is making me examine all my toy purchases, and I’m committed to avoiding Hasbro products for the long run. (And for those of you who know that I buy gifts on a regular basis for some 7 grandkids, a niece and a new nephew, that adds up to some serious purchasing). Let me explain.

Hasbro has owned the Scrabble brand for years, and over the years, their consecutive product managers have shown that they don’t get how seriously Scrabble players take their game. They’ve successively trivialized and ignored the dictionaries, tried to “cutisie” it up (can you imagine changing chess pieces to pop culture figurines, or changing the rules for how checkmate works? this is the magnitude of change they proposed, which you can read about in Work Freak by Stefan Fatsis). So it didn’t surprise me that they underestimated the popularity of the players wanting to play online.

A lot of little sites offer Scrabble online, but what seems to be threatening to Hasbro is a couple of entrepreneurial brothers who created Scrabulous. Because it was on FaceBook, the application was heavily used, and allowed FaceBook members to play with their friends around the world.

It’s not like Scrabulous built an application after Hasbro provided an already excellent service to their user base; instead, the brothers behind Scrabulous saw a gap and filled it. (Ironically, it’s the principal behind American entrepreneurship so their actions are quite ironic.) So what went wrong? Hasbro dragged their feet, and didn’t service their customers for the longest time. And then when they say that the gap had been filled by some entrepreneurs, then they stepped in and shut them down. Even then, Hasbro still doesn’t get it. You can’t play with friends outside of your country (with the exception of Canada and the US, I believe - see the comments in the link for more on this). And if you live in North America, you can’t access Scrabulous at all - you’re stuck with the inferior Hasbro version. It feels like being in a relationship with a rather neglectful partner; they annoy you so much that you just want them to move out and inflict their arrogance on some other unsuspecting victim.

If Hasbro is concerned about their intellectual property, they should have worked with the Scrabulous folks to do something collaboratively that would benefit both of the companies. Instead, they’re alienated lots of users who associate their tactics with the heavy-handedness of Homeland Security. I wonder if they’ll try to justify their actions with the trite old excuse (see the BC Ferries post from last week) - why not, nothing else seems to make sense from a user point of view. They’re doing what’s best for their internal needs, at the expense of their potential, now alienated, customers. And in an environment where everything is on the Web and available at a click of a mouse, it’s easy to make friend - and enemies - in mass quantities, very fast.

On a personal note, I’ve gained more time, as I no longer have a reason to go to FaceBook every day. My 350 average will probably decline, but, well, those are the breaks. This is one customer who, on principle, can’t bring myself to engage with Hasbro.

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