Your Site is Part of Your Company

Nice entry at Six Pixels of Separation (via Chris Brogan on Twitter) regarding the way big retailers' stores are often disconnected from their online operations and merchandising.

I explained that none of this would have happened had the website been correct, to which he replied, "it's the website... that's not our problem... we're the store."

He wasn't being rude. He wasn't treating me poorly. He simply said what we all know (but don't want to admit): "the Website is not the same as the store, it's always different from the store, and even I don't know who to call when something like this happens."

No, he didn't say that line exactly, but I'm paraphrasing the overall sentiment of the dialogue.

The writer makes some great points and is absolutely correct that a retailer needs to treat its web site as part of what it does, not something separate. Many retailers have made tremendous improvements at this over the past few years. For example, look no further that Wal-Mart's colossal Site-to-Store program. Wal-Mart has managed to harness its greatest strength (i.e., the scale of nearly 4,000 stores) to attract more consumers to its web site.

The real issue here is that legacy policies and systems prevent retailers from being able to fully tie their online and offline worlds together. Keeping inventory information accurate in real time is excruciatingly difficult and a struggle for virtually every retailer. Pricing is another problem. Margin requirements and competition vary from one channel to the next, and retailers face a significant challenge in deciding whether or not they can honor online prices in their stores.

One thing is certain. Retailers need to understand that their customers are asking new questions these days, and they need to equip their store employees with the right answers.

Learning from Scrabulous

Richard Gottlieb, a blogger at Playthings magazine, posted on Monday about the Scrabulous situation. In short, a couple guys from India created a Facebook app that's a game remarkably similar to Scrabble. It's no surprise that Hasbro, owner of Scrabble, was a little upset about the blatant infringement of their intellectual property rights. Hasbro recently took legal action that led Scrabulous' owners to change the product significantly. The fans don't like the changes and are quite irritated with Hasbro.

Gottlieb starts by saying that "Hasbro has managed the Scrabulous challenge about as well as can be expected." Well, I agree that Hasbro has every legal right to protect their IP, but to say that they handled this as well as can be expected is a bit dubious. I am not suggesting that Hasbro handled this poorly, but the reality is that their actions created a risk for their brand. As one commenter noted:

I no longer play any version of Scrabble online and I also eliminated a planned purchase of the traditional board game as I was going to introduce the game to my kids. My friends have done the same. They took a million fans of the game and thew [sic] them in the trash, hopefully it's just the beginning of more failure for this poorly managed company.

To say that Scrabulous fans will "get over it" is short sighted. Time will tell if Hasbro's attempt to "take pee out of the swimming pool" is positive or negative for their brand.

The second half of Gottlieb's post is terrific. He's absolutely right. Toy companies need to be much more in tune with the increasing number of Gen X and Gen Y moms and dads who live their lives online in ways that much of upper management just just doesn't understand.

Just think... what if Hasbro had reacted to Scrabulous by immediately introducing an official and better Scrabble Facebook app of their own? They could have trumped the imposter or at least slowed them down enough to make Scrabble appear genuine and Scrabulous as a cheap knockoff. We'll never know if the thought even crossed their minds. In fact, I wonder how long it took someone in a position of authority to even notice what was going on.