- Becky Ebenkamp

The idea: Even a single-celled organism could excel at Candyland or Chutes and Ladders with a little luck. But a certain board game involving wooden tiles, triple-word scores and beaucoup brainpower has “elitist” written all over it. For the Hasbro/Parker Brothers’ classic Scrabble, that intellectual image would have to change to stop a sales slump, so a redesign of the game box was in order. “It looked like a mature brand,” said Steve Phillips, president of Phillips Design Group, Boston, the agency that handled the project. “The box was very plain and there was no emotional connection to the brand.”

The research: Scrabble has always had its fans, and even its fanatics. The game is hardly suffering from a lack of awareness, as 84% of the population is familiar with it, according to company research. The problem is that while everyone knows Scrabble, not everyone is a fan; the brain game intimidates a portion of the population. There’s also an aging factor: Scrabble players are primarily between the ages of 35 and 49 years old and Hasbro had been having trouble getting new, younger players into the game.

The challenge: A key design challenge was to make Scrabble inclusive to nonplayers who shunned the game because it made them feel like dummies. “We needed to broaden the appeal, not the awareness,” said Phillips, recalling his own mild disdain for the game his father always beat him at.  “How do you make it fun and engage young people, who we need to grow the brand?”

How it was created: Phillips’ team started exploring how to convert those who didn’t dabble in Scrabble. The agency picked three positions and created presentations for each idea featuring a mission statement, complementary images of people engaged in the game and sample Scrabble box designs embodying those traits. The first one, “Every word counts,” was predicated on the inclusive idea that everyone’s a winner to counteract the game’s intimidation effect. The second, “Every word spells fun,” stressed Scrabble’s play and social bonding aspects. The third version, “Now it’s your turn,” was a straightforward appeal to youth and pitched Scrabble as “the word game for generation next.” For each of the three design directions, Phillips explored multiple box prototypes ranging from subtle tweaks to the current plain red ribbon version to wild diversions from Scrabble’s traditional look and feel.

THE FINAL DESIGN    

Spells a winner: Hasbro chose a design that incorporated features from Phillips’ first two presentations. The fun aspect is literally spelled out in Scrabble tiles and comes through in bright colors and shapes that evoke energy. Meanwhile, the “every word’s a winner” line conveys the inclusive yet competitive aspect on the box.

PROTOTYPES

Game theory: Design explorations centered on themes of “everybody winning,” “fun” and “youth” as represented in three sample box designs (above). In the final design (left), Phillips decided to nix showing people on the packaging because it could be polarizing to buyers. Being a classic game, Scrabble had some equity that Hasbro didn’t want to alter. The brand’s red heritage hue remained intact, while the familiar typeface got some minor adjustments. Notably, it lost some of its curlicue flourishes and the letter “E” was changed to lowercase.