Whit Alexander: Years at Microsoft taught him the importance of developing products quickly and hiring mimes.
With an M.B.A. from the Tuck School at Dartmouth, Tait knew the conventional wisdom: companies design products to meet a need. But that didn't seem quite the right way to think about Cranium. Instead, the two founders decided, they would engineer their game around a "moment," specifically the moment when players "appear smart and funny in front of family and friends." So they designed Cranium with 14 activities that range from spelling words backward to humming to drawing with your eyes shut. "We wanted everyone to high-five their teammate at least once per game," says Tait. "I know that's not a very scientific metric, but that's what we're going for."
That strategy made sense for two reasons. First, it greatly multiplied the opportunities for new products, since the number and variety of "moments" experienced in a human life are relatively large. (By contrast, most board-game makers expand their lines by tweaking the parent game for different age groups, of which there are a limited number.) Second, by appealing to a set of emotions rather than a set of demographics, the game connects players, who bond over references to cultural artifacts and shared reminiscences. Around the company, such embedded emotional cues are called "touchstones." Along with "moments," they create a kind of custom operational vocabulary for the business. "We consider the vocabulary a core asset," says Alexander. "Brands are only relevant when people use them on a daily basis. These words reinforce what all of our employees do every day."
But despite the originality of the partners' approach, Cranium's odds of success were comparable to using all seven letters to hit the triple word score in Scrabble. Some 50% of board games fail in their first year, according to industry estimates, and of the remaining 50%, half fail in the second year. Before Cranium's debut, the industry hadn't had a hit since Pictionary, which came out in 1984. But that didn't discourage Tait and Alexander. They felt the market was ripe for something big.
Richard Tait: Forget toy stores. The former shepherd knew he'd find his customers in a latte line.
Using $100,000 of their savings, the two built a playable game prototype and began testing it in early 1998. But as first-time entrepreneurs, "we didn't know how to make it happen," says Tait. "So we dug around." A quick immersion in the game industry -- which included Web research, interviews with specialty retailers, and audiences with the PR team that launched Trivial Pursuit and the creators of Pictionary -- left them comfortable in their knowledge of the market.
Finding a playing field
But where should they sell Cranium? Toy stores were the obvious venue, but neither founder was a big fan of the obvious. So they decided not to compete for a share of the existing game-buying market. Instead, believing that Cranium was innovative enough to create a market of its own, they sought a channel where the product's mere presence would call attention to it. In their minds they weren't selling a game but a social experience.
Since Seattle was their hometown, the founders conducted many of their most important conversations in the plush upholstered armchairs of a local Starbucks. One afternoon they noticed that the latte line parading by represented their ideal audience: 25-to-35-year-old "dating yupsters who wanted to connect with others." Fortuitously, Tait had recently scaled Mount Kilimanjaro with a friend of the man who was then the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. The founders snagged an introduction and ended up playing a few rounds with the espresso mogul.
Starbucks, it turned out, had long sought a game celebrating coffeehouse culture. Schultz told David Brewster, who was then the company's product manager for retail media, to "make it happen," and by November 1998, Cranium was in some 1,500 Starbucks outlets nationwide. Tait and Alexander had learned from industry experts and from their own focus groups -- at which participants tried to take the product home -- that people who play a game are more likely to recommend it, so they gave Starbucks sample copies for store employees and patrons to play. "That made a huge difference because they started enthusiastically recommending the game," says Brewster. "We couldn't get it out to the stores fast enough in that first holiday season. Even our warehouse was quickly empty."
At the same time, the partners were courting Barnes & Noble. Terese Profaci, the bookstore chain's director of gift merchandising, met with the entrepreneurs in New York City. She recalls that her boss at the time told them, "I don't know why you're here. We don't sell games." But Profaci's boss had her and her staff play a round and ended up stocking Cranium.
The founders also wanted to get Cranium's name out to the public, and that meant advertising. Television, the mainstay of the game industry, was too expensive, so the two lifted a tactic from Trivial Pursuit, which they had stumbled across in their research. For a mere $15,000 they recruited 110 radio stations around the country to have their DJs read Cranium questions over the air and award games to callers with the correct answer. "Hearing a clever question or two gave a minitrial to a broad audience," says Tait.
