When being right is actually being wrong (in the eyes of your customer).
Have you ever gotten into a tiff with your spouse or significant other in which it became more important to be “right” than to come up with a workable solution? And how did that work out for you?
Well, much the same thing is playing out on the social networking site Facebook. Last year, two brothers from Calcutta, India came up with a Facebook app called Scrabulous, essentially an online knock-off of the popular Hasbro word/puzzle game Scrabble. It quickly became one of the most popular apps on Facebook, installed by more than four million Facebook users and entertaining millions of users (and wasting countless millions of office hours).
Predictably, Hasbro sued to get the app taken off. In it’s place, the company has offered an electronic—and fully licensed–version of Scrabble to Facebook users. The thing is, Facebook users by an overwhelming number, much preferred the original Scrabulous to Hasbro’s. The official version was released in beta form and has been plagued with bugs. Of the four million Scrabulous users, only 20,000 or so have jumped on board Hasbro’s release. Facebook users (definitely not a shy lot) are going all over the blogosphere to protest Hasbro’s legal maneuver and grumble about big bad Hasbro quashing the little guy. A new Facebook group called “Save Scrabulous” has even surfaced, and counts over 100,000 friends.
Was Hasbro wrong to sue? The company was definitely within its legal rights—it has an obvious claim to the intellectual property. But how does that sit with the end user? The question that Hasbro and other game companies has to answer in an age of easy access to the tools of game publishing is this: Is a lawsuit the best first option? Scrabulous has over half a million daily active users. The back end is thoroughly tested and relatively bug-free. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for the company to use the Scrabulous incident as an opportunity to earn more customers than turn them off? Is there another option the company could have turned to before setting loose the lawyers?
Scrabulous could be the best marketing campaign Scrabble has ever had. Hasbro has declined to release sales numbers since Scrabulous launched, but anecdotally Scrabulous has made the game more popular, resulting in more “brick-and-mortar” sales of the game.
If Hasbro was intent on defending its intellectual property rights, it could always have chosen to either buy the app or license it. That would add the company’s name to a popular app that already boasts millions of loyal users. Not bad exposure. (Adonomics values Scrabulous at just over $2.7 million—a steal for acquiring 4+ million unique users).
The web is essentially about freedom. Any block of that freedom, whether backed by legal precedent or not, is almost always viewed by users as Draconian. While defending intellectual property is the responsibility of management, it helps to bear in mind that your brand exists in the mind of your customers, not in a standards manual or on a spreadsheet.
Posted by Mickey
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