Hasbro

Making the world transform. (Well, apart from Japan, these guys handle that.)

Hasbro is a toy company, and owner of the Transformers brand in most markets outside of Japan, where it is owned by TakaraTomy.

History

Siamese twins at home.

Hasbro was originally founded in 1923 as "Hassenfeld Brothers" by brothers Henry and Helal Hassenfeld from Rhode Island. The company originally sold textile remnants, but soon moved into manufacturing pencil boxes and school supplies.

In 1952, Hasbro first rose to fame with a little toy called Mr. Potato Head. You might have heard of it. The company went so far as to purchase advertising time for the toy on a newfangled invention called television. You might have heard of that, too.

In 1964, Hasbro had an even greater success with the original G.I. Joe toy designed by Don Levine, which caused Hassenfeld Bros. to grow to be one of the largest toy companies in the USA. In 1968, the company would change its name to "Hasbro Industries, Inc."

Through a series of importing licenses and spin-offs, G.I. Joe ultimately led to the Microman and Diaclone toylines by Japanese toymaker Takara, which in turn would lead to Hasbro's release of the original Transformers toyline in 1984. At that time, Hasbro was employing the services of Marvel Comics and the advertising agency Griffin Bacal, who helped them come up with new marketing strategies and background stories for their toylines, including the revamped G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and The Transformers.

In 1984, Hasbro also bought out a competing toy company named Milton Bradley (MB), which resulted in the merged company briefly assuming the name "Hasbro Bradley, Inc." After the merger was completed, the company changed its name into simply "Hasbro, Inc." Milton Bradley's European facilities would also be used to distribute the initial wave of Transformers toys to be released in Europe before the merger was completed. Later in the '80s, Hasbro would go on to release other toy brands such as Visionaries and Battle Beasts--the latter eventually becoming closely (if strangely) related to Transformers.

In 1991, Hasbro bought out former competitor Tonka. In the same year, Hasbro consolidated most of their international markets: Prior to this point, Hasbro subsidiaries such as the afroementioned Milton Bradley had still been responsible for distributing Transformers toys in some countries (even though the toys' packaging had sported the name "Hasbro" since 1986). Those subsidiaries were officially restructured and given the parent companies' name in an attempt to establish "Hasbro" as a worldwide household name.

In 1995, Hasbro temporarily transferred control of the Transformers franchise to its Kenner subsidiary (which had previously been a subsidiary of Tonka), then phased out the Kenner brand in 2000.

In the new millennium, Hasbro, following Marvel's example, intends to reinvent itself as an "entertainment" company, Hasbro Studios. Instead of merely commissioning animated TV shows as advertising vehicles for their toys, Hasbro licenses its brands to Hollywood studios, which turn them into big budget blockbuster movies, using the toys' established household names as a marketing appeal. 2007's Transformers movie was the first of those feature films. The sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and a G.I. Joe movie were both released in 2009, and movies based on the successful board game Monopoly and Kenner's old Stretch Armstrong toy have also been confirmed. Hasbro believes that their new "the movie of the toy" strategy will be more lucrative than the old "the toy of the movie" concept, which involves hefty licensing fees.<ref name="brandweek">Brandweek article on Hasbro's new movie-related business strategy</ref>

Hasbro today

Employees

Corporate

• Brian Goldner, Chief Executive Officer
• Alfred J. Verrecchia, Chairman of the Board

Boys' Toys

• Samantha Lomow, Vice President of Marketing and Design
• Vickie Stratford, formerly Sr. Design Project Manager for Transformers, now transferred to the Star Wars brand as its head of design(?)
• Joe Kyde, Designer (Boy's Toys, Exclusive Division)

Girls' Toys

• Michelle Field, Director of Marketing

Transformers Brand

Marketing

• Greg Lombardo, Sr. Director of Global Marketing
• Michael Vibede Vanting, Global Brand Marketing Director
• Michael Ballog, marketing
• Jared Jones, marketing
• Matthew Proulx, marketing
• Forest Lee, copywriting

Design

• Aaron Archer, Director of Global Design and Development
• Jared Wade, Director of Global Product Design
• Eric Siebenaler, Senior Product Designer
• William Rawley, Senior Product Designer

Hasbro's regional offices

Hasbro has smaller offices all around the world, who are not involved in the production of toys, but rather take care of the customer relationships and marketing in their local regions. Known locations of local offices include Denmark (covering the whole nordic region), Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and New Zealand.

Relationship with fandom

Hasbro showed they love the fans by giving a tour of their offices during BotCon 2007. Hasbro showed they hate the fans by including this!

Fandom's relationship with Hasbro is as paradoxical and confusing as our relationships with our parents. They are an incredible source of joy and happiness, as well as the focal point of rage and blame for pretty much everyone in the Transformers community. To much of the fandom, Hasbro's actual involvement in the Transformers franchise is rarely acknowledged when not negative. Many view their activities to consist entirely of:

• Slapping fans in the face.
• Getting things all wrong.
• Screwing up Takara's toys.
• Being lazy.
• Trying to make money.
• Ruining everything forever.

When they found the time to create and maintain a successful, celebrated franchise that was the basis of 25 years of obsession and happiness for the exact same fans is unknown.

Questionable brand decisions

• In the early days of the Generation 1 line's run, Hasbro were entirely focused on "product" and viewed the attached fiction as a mere marketing tool. As a consequence, they viewed "characters" as easily replacable, and their strategy at that time can be summed up as "new toys, new characters". Hasbro certainly didn't anticipate the audience actually to attach to the characters featured in the television show, and were utterly surprised by the fan backlash after nearly all of the 1984-85 cast had been graphically killed off in the animated movie and replaced by newly introduced characters. Hasbro now recognizes that this move was a mistake that hurt the brand.<ref>USA Today: "Transformers: From Toy Story to Serious Art?"</ref> In Hasbro's defense, though, it needs to be pointed out that this wasn't a flawed approach unique to them, as the importance of recognizable characters for the public image of a brand was a novel concept to the toy industry as a whole at that time. Hasbro have learned their lesson, and now mostly kill relative nobodies, and rely a lot more heavily on recurring, recognizable characters across their various toylines and the corresponding fiction.

• Hasbro's corporate executives were eager to make the move to multilingual packaging for the United States market to save money, forcing that decision upon their Transformers staff. Although representatives were prepared with responses to fan complaints about how ugly and uninformative it was, the design team eventually managed to convince their higher-ups how ugly it was, so the US packaging returned to normal.<ref name="botcon2005">Steve-o's 2005 BotCon Report</ref>

• At times, Hasbro has been willing to allow the broadcast of clearly incomplete or poorly-constructed advertising media.

• Hasbro often have their official promotional toy photography done by people (both internal and outsourced third party photo studios) who have a tendency to display the toys in awkwardly mistransformed states, sometimes so glaring that the photos could be viewed as really bad representations of Hasbro's products... yet they are used in official advertising, including Hasbro's public website and even on the toys' packaging. Reportedly, Hasbro has recently decided to send a member of a design team (at least an intern) along to the photo studio to transform and pose the toys properly.

• As the toys became more and more complex, Hasbro's official toy instructions became less and less helpful. Written directions were omitted entirely in favor of pictures-only instructions with the launch of the Armada line in 2002, and those pictures-only instructions have a tendency to omit useful steps, are sometimes unclear on vital details, and might occasionally be based on early prototypes that differ from the final toy, thereby including transformation steps that aren't possible with the toy in hand. Universe Sideswipe even recycled the instructions from his mold-mate Sunstreaker, even though Sideswipe was supposed to use an alternate transformation as compared to Sunstreaker.

• In the lead up to the 2007 live-action movie, to deal with the expected international audience for both the movie and the accompanying toys, Hasbro started to redirect visitors of their official Transformers website to localized versions of the site based upon their IPs. However, it was obvious that Hasbro's interest in their international markets was rather marginal, as demonstrated by the fact that many of these international localised sites were rarely updated, if at all; and if they were, the updates were still marginal, and the product lists remained incomplete. To the frustration of non-American fans, clicking any links to the US version of the site resulted in the user being automatically redirected to their outdated localized versions. Even bugs that allowed users to circumvent the redirect were eventually "fixed" in favor of an even more aggressive redirect. This was finally resolved for good in 2009, with the addition of a US-specific website URL that doesn't redirect anyone anywhere anymore.

• The somewhat more "mature" tone of the live action movies, Transformers (2007) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, especially the crude, often sexually-themed humor displayed in both films, has been the center of much controversy. In particular, a lobbyist group named the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood repeatedly tried to lobby the Federal Communications Commission into tightening regulations for marketing movies rated "PG-13" and associated merchandise to children.<ref name="fccfilter">Ars Technica article on the CCFC/FCC story.</ref> Hasbro themselves appear to be still undecided about their official position regarding the more "mature" tone of the movies and its ramifications for the brand's public image, having left several questions to this effect unanswered.<ref name="allsparkqa">July/August 2009 edition of the Allspark Hasbro Q&A</ref><ref name="tformersqa">July/August 2009 edition of the TFormers Hasbro Q&A]</ref>

Trivia

• The Decepticon Flamewar collects Hasbro memorabilia.
• Hasbro isn't all about selling toys and making money. According to Transformers live-action movie writer Roberto Orci, some at Hasbro argued against updating some returning characters in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, so that parents would not have to buy the same toy twice for their children just because of a minor change or modification to the characters' designs. <ref>Roberto Orci posting at TFW2005.com</ref> (We will just point out now that they still did that.)
• According to Hasbro Australia representatives and designer Eric Siebenaler, all of the Transformers toys jointly developed between Hasbro and Takara/TakaraTomy are manufactured at factories contracted to the Japanese toy company. This means Takara is indirectly responsible for whatever quality control problems you have been having with your toys, so you can stop complaining about it being entirely Hasbro's fault.

Footnotes

<references/>

External Links

• Hasbro's official website
• Hasbro's official Transformers website