Case Study: Hasbro - Monopoly.com

About

Hasbro is an American toy and game company headquartered in Pawtucket, RI. Founded in 1923 as Hassenfeld Brothers, the since renamed Hasbro has grown from a small textile remnant company to the second largest toy maker in the world and producer of the world’s best-selling board game, Monopoly. Hasbro is now the parent company of several subsidiaries, including Playskool, Parker Brothers and Tonka, and is responsible for many games and toys that have become engrained into popular culture.

Challenge

Hasbro’s management team needed to reassess their approach to Web Marketing and promotion of the Monopoly brand in order to meet corporate sales objectives.  While overall sales of Monopoly brand products were impressive, the existing Monopoly site was not producing the sales conversion numbers they had expected.  The site also did not meet current best practice web standards or localization needs.

Neptune Web was engaged to accomplish the following objectives:

• Create an online user experience that is fun, modern and reflective of the Hasbro brand and the personality of Monopoly games
• Establish Monopoly.com as the official “Stop” for all games Monopoly
• Generate increased qualified traffic to the Monopoly.com site
• Localize the website to accommodate a world-wide audience and market
• Drive sales of Monopoly games through Hasbro Toy Shop, online and offline retailers

Solution & Success

Neptune Web worked closely with the client’s leadership to deliver the following:

• Completely redesigned website with a fun and playful design that speaks to the “Win it all” personality of Monopoly,  but that leverages classic branding cues, such as Mr. Monopoly, deed cards, packaging art, etc.
• A “bullet-proof,” elastic template that allows Hasbro’s internal team to translate the site content into multiple languages without breaking the site templates in order to support localization for a global market
• A modular design to address the game’s growing product line, allowing the client’s internal team to add new product content without compromising the integrity of the site’s design
• Web pages architecturally and structurally optimized for search engine web crawlers to help drive qualified traffic to the new site, including the use of text-based copy wherever possible and content-rich landing pages for natural (organic) search engine results and pay-per-click marketing,  respectively
• Three separate Flash animation headers to ensure a refreshing and entertaining user experience to keep visitors interested and to increase return visits
• A Flash game demo to grab the attention of the visitors and trigger enthusiasm for the new Monopoly game lines

Note

Neptune Web has continued to work with Hasbro to improve the web presentation of some of their most successful game lines.  Recent projects have included sites for Scrabble, Twister, Operation and Whac-a-mole, as well as an portal site to help manage and improve traffic flow to the individual game sites.