Studying the grand masters
With orders pouring in from Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com (which came on board at roughly the same time as the others), Tait and Alexander decided it was time to assume the trappings of a real company. They assigned themselves titles as unorthodox as their product. (Tait is grand pooh-bah, with responsibilities for business operations and marketing; Alexander is chief noodler, with a focus on product development, editorial content, and manufacturing.) Renting space in a downtown Seattle office building, they transformed it into an environmental version of Cranium, with walls of the same red, blue, green, and yellow that appear on the box and carpets of the purple of Cranium clay.
Tait and Alexander got their marketing ideas from game veterans. But to build a company, their benchmark was Microsoft. Like their former employer, Cranium's founders vowed to "hire the smartest people you can get" and to look for employees with skill sets and backgrounds different from their own. Taking that mandate to an extreme, they have hired, among others, a professional mime and a children's art teacher. To attract top talent they offer stock options, which are de rigueur for technology companies but unusual in the game industry.
"We consider [our] vocabulary a core asset. Brands are only relevant when people use them on a daily basis. These words reinforce what all of our employees do every day."
--Whit Alexander
Cranium's product-development techniques also borrow liberally from the software giant's. The detailed, iterative, customer-focused process is so fast that Cranium games typically come together in six months or less. Cranium's product-development team brainstorms; builds a variety of prototypes; chooses a platform (desktop, board, portable); makes decisions about content, packaging, and manufacturing; and tests and retests.
And as Microsoft does with software, Cranium lets real users shape its products. Friends and customers gather frequently for test matches, and the product-development team sets up "intercepts" at the local science center to corral visitors into playing new games. At Microsoft, Tait and Alexander had sometimes been frustrated because the cost of reprogramming and the potentially dramatic ripple effect of changes prevented them from taking too many user suggestions. At Cranium, by contrast, they make copious adjustments. "We might change the rules four times in a night, based on what we're hearing," says Alexander. "All it takes is a little desktop publishing and a printer to offer up another version."
Cranium's founders are borrowing yet another Microsoft page as they introduce versions of the game for the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Germany. At Microsoft, where more than half of revenues come from overseas, consumer products are not translated; they are "localized." The Encarta encyclopedia, for example, lists one height for the Matterhorn in its Italian edition and another height in its French edition, because the two countries disagree -- strongly -- over how tall the mountain is. "We learned to celebrate the local culture," says Tait of his work on Encarta, "and we do the same with Cranium." As a result, someone playing British Cranium might have to use clay to model beans on toast. The Canadian version asks players to draw "hockey hair."
Such attention to differentiation and detail is unusual in the game industry, experts agree. "I'm not sure how many companies do that kind of extensive testing and tweaking," says Sean McGowan, coordinator of the toy industry's media event PlayDate. "Lots of decisions are made based on what's hot, like Harry Potter or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Then the question is, 'Is this license going to help sell this cardboard?"
Cranium is also smart enough to recognize the things it isn't smart about. Like many small game companies, it outsources industrial and graphic design, sales, and manufacturing. "We try to be laser focused on our core competencies and resist the temptation to bring it in-house," says Alexander. "Thinking outside the box was easy because we were never in the box," says Bill Furlong, whose title is major mojo but who also answers to director of marketing. "We come up with all kinds of crazy ideas and then get really experienced partners in sales, manufacturing, and PR to tell us why they won't work or how to tweak them so they do."
Setting the rules
But the most important lesson Cranium's founders took from Bill Gates was the power of a mission clearly and consistently communicated. Tait and Alexander recall that back when they worked at Microsoft, you could have asked any of its then 22,000 employees about the company's goal and they wouldn't have missed a beat: "a computer on every desktop and in every home." The need for similar internal branding grew pressing at Cranium in 2000, as it added employees and products and came to rely more heavily on partners, from industrial designers to Webmasters. Ensconced once more in chairs at Starbucks, Tait and Furlong listed the attributes they desired for the games and for the company and, together with Alexander, came up with CHIFF. "CHIFF means that our employees and partners will come to the same decisions Whit and I would, without a lot of hand-holding," says Tait. "Meetings are faster and more efficient, even with foreign manufacturers, because we've created a common language."
