Marketing Fail: Hasbro, how you disappoint me!

It’s absolutely amazing to me when I see a large established company drop the ball on things that should be common sense. Its as though some companies stopped operating like human-beings selling widgets to other human-begins and just transformed into a blob of under achievement wrapped in corporate red tape (Oh snap, yeah, I went there!).

Today’s case study comes from Hasbro. You know, the same company that littered our childhood with G.I Joes, Transformers, Mr. Potato Head, Monopoly and the borderline mind numbingly auditory-ly sadistic board game Operation. That’s the one with the dude that looks like a clown that squeaks in agonizing pain every time that you erroneously remove a bone from his body.

ANYWAY, I digress. I was watching TV and a commercial came on for what looks like a new version of *Monopoly called Monopoly DEAL. The commercial was pretty good; a simple black screen with a dark box with the Monopoly DEAL logo on it and some voice prompting you to log on to www.monopoly.com for more information. Ok, simple enough. Short and sweet, clear call to action – so far so good.

I get to the site ready to be educated and perhaps even purchase myself a $19.95 reminder of more innocent times and I see it. Or rather, I DON’T see it. I look left, I look right, I scroll up AND I scroll down and nothing. No Monopoly DEAL ANYWHERE on the page that I was SPECIFICALLY asked to go to by a very expensive commercial. The only reference that I see to anything Monopoly is a small box with an image of Monopoly World Edition on it – and God knows I’m not going to buy that! Not because I have anything against the world; but because I already have trouble collecting rent on my house on Boardwalk let alone attempting to manage multi-national properties – the tax implications alone… lets not get into it.

Enough jokes, I’m not properly communicating my rage and disappointment.

So there I am, looking for a place, ANYWHERE, to get more info on Monopoly Deal so that I could maybe buy it. After a frustrating 3, no, 4 minutes I FINALLY figure out that I might have to use the top navigation, so I look around and click on “Play” and I find something! “Monopoly Games” it tells me. YES! Score! I click on it and it sends me to a freaking flash game! I DON’T want a freakin’ flash game! I want to give you my money Hasbro!! I want to buy your product! Can I please buy your product? That would be freakin marvelous Hasbro.

It turns out that I have to go to http://www.hasbro.com/games/kid-games/monopoly/default.cfm?page=Products/Detail&product_id=23453 in order to get ANY information on Monopoly deal. And wouldn’t you know it, when I FINALLY get there I get a 4 sentence general description. Now it’s on Hasbro!

A Lesson learned

This is a classic case of what I like to call “corporate silo” mentality (I’m trade marking that).

Essentially you have a large company that has so many levels in so many departments that they stop talking to each other in any kind of meaningful way. This disconnect within the corporate culture not only creates, in my opinion, instances like the one that I mentioned above but also spreads a general sense of complacency and disenfranchisement while further disconnecting the employee from the overall goals of the organization.

See, a nail is always going to be a nail to a hammer right? So Marketing is ONLY concerned with the Marketing of the product and could care less about the implications that certain decisions can have on the major goals of the company. They just care about meeting their respective numbers to keep the person that can fire them happy.

So in the example above, if you had a company with an strong and open communication culture, Marketing would have spoken to IT/Web Development and asked: “hey, what’s the BEST way for us to get this product moving online?” And IT/Web Development would have said “well, you can start off by having a good landing page!”. See, that’s pretty simple. But nope!

Over complicated by poor communication, enjoy your silo’s Hasbro while the dudes that make Bratz keep kicking your ass! Oh yeah, you just got served! Bring it

*If you don’t know what Monopoly is consult with your inner child and/or Wikipedia