YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Cocks

lines on the record: 105
first: 2023-03-31
most recent: 2023-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think what resonates for me is fans were concerned about the frequency of card set releases, particularly in Q4 last year. And, you know, we had some supply chain issues. You know, magic wasn't immune to some snafus in the supply chain. We had one card set that got delayed by six months because we couldn't get a specialty glue.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is something that's very important to you. You've talked about how you grew up with these brands playing these games. Yeah. Whenever you've mentioned, in particular the games you've lit up, you're obviously very engaged. Your fans are saying, hey, the dynamic of this game is changing because anyone can just go buy the rarest cards. Does that resonate with you as a criticism”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Growing by both revenue and player growth. So, you know, in the one year that we didn't grow, we declined by about 2%. That's a pretty darn good track record that I think is tough to second guess.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going back to the data point, we will typically pull tens of thousands of players per year on a brand like Magic. We will talk to thousands of individual stores. Probably the most important channel for magic are like mom and pop game stores around the world that do relatively modest businesses. They're small businesses. They're like 250,000 to 400,000 of total kind of ring registers. You know, maybe the owner's pulling in 50, 60, maybe $70,000 a year. They're doing this because they're passionate about it, not because, you know, they want to get Uber rich. So we're very careful about how we curate the experience for those stores, make sure that they have a good experience, make sure the players have a good experience. And I think success kind of speaks for itself. They're growing for 13 out of the last 14 years with the one year you did.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I mean, Bank of America in that report certainly had their opinion. That was done by an analyst who'd covered the brand for about three months just to give it a little bit of perspective. The brand has grown for 13 out of the last 14 years.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The criticism here is that you're maybe aligned more towards the shareholder, right? Like at one point, there's a note from Bank of America, which Santas Bro is over monetizing magic, which is frankly just an incredible thing for a bank to say about any product. We're taking too much money out of this product. And their argument was that Hasro is making it less valuable, making it less special in trading short-term profits for long-term brand durability.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because before us making these products, they were going out and kind of buying these products on the secondary market and spending about the same money as what they spend with us when we actually give them a package product. So the growth of the brand has been tremendous. With the new player growth, the secondary market has grown, which is good, I think, for everybody. But then also the primary market is especially grown because we've had a segmentation approach and just embraced segments that previously were kind of ignoring and made them happy. And I think aligned everything from player to the shareholder to the employee.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we discovered was, hey, if we embrace a growth mindset, if we embrace new segments and actually build bespoke products for them and again, kind of focus on doing right by the player, we would tend to be rewarded for it. And fast forward five, six years later, that competitive segment still is an important segment for us, but it's just a little bit bigger than it was about five or six years ago. And almost all the growth in the brand has been from that social player, that commander player and building products specifically for them. And then secondarily, from the collector, that we also realized wanted kind of more kind of bespoke products and ways to bling out their deck and have just kind of fun things that they can collect. In general, we haven't seen a huge growth in the total amount of spend that these players have had.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rapidly rotated version, and that was played mostly in our high end tournaments. And we saw that there was these other versions of play, but frankly, we were a little scared of them because we weren't sure what it would do to the business. Probably the biggest version was this player-created format called Commander, which was like a four-player format that had these 100 card decks. We were concerned like, ooh, like, you know, would we be, is that as lucrative of a market for us and should we really focus on that or should we just have like the players do it?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think with magic, I think it's important to keep in mind that brand has been having a great growth. And it's been fairly balanced growth. It's been about growth of new players as well as kind of engaging existing players, as well as kind of bringing back players who were lapsed for some life event. They stopped playing magic because they moved away from their gaming group or they moved away from their favorite store. And a couple years later, they were able to find the game again. So I think being able to grow a brand on a balanced basis is important. And that's something I think we've been adept at doing. The strategy for growing magic overall over the last, call it five years has been what we call segmentation. So when I started at Wizards, the primary audience for magic and almost the sole audience that we focused on for magic was called the competitive player, kind of like the classic player who liked to play in store, who played a version of the game called Standard, which was like this.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's put that into practice a little bit. You've had a busy year, and there have been. Some bumps in the road. Let's start with magic the gathering. A lot of new card sets released last year. A lot of flack from people saying, okay, we're devaluing some of the legendary cards and now instead of one of our editors called it the Willy Wonka effect where you never knew. Like you might just get the golden ticket. You might get the rare card. But now it's pay to play, right? You can just pay it. Thousand dollars, whatever it is, and get all the rare cards. How are you coming through that? I mean, that feels like, all right, we're going to really get the money of this brand right now. We're going to make more expensive products because it's not just kids, it's adults with money now. And we can just ask them to open their wallets.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. But I think fundamentally, I think the most important thing that drives our employees is most of them have a similar story to me. My story, Candyland is the first board game I remember playing growing up. Transformers and GI Joe were my favorite action figures growing up. D&D was kind of like the first kind of serious game I started playing growing up. Magic helped me kind of bridge a tough time in college as I was growing up. Baldur's gate, an original D&D video game, helped to inspire me to get into the video game industry. Like Hasbro is an important part of my life and my fandom of it is genuine. And that's echoed across the majority of our employees. And so I think everyone here wants to not just kind of help drive the fandom. They want to put the fandom in a better place. So I think if we're able to stack up kind of like those three lenses, what's good for the...”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say it's a three part framework. The first frame is always what's best for the consumer, what's best for the fan. What would delight them? Because generally speaking, if we're able to delight the fan, usually we're able to profit from it. There's usually a fair value exchange based on that. I think the second area that I focus on is what's good for the shareholder, you know, how do we make sure that what we're doing is profitable. It helps position us for growth. And, you know, it's not just a sugar boost that kind of maximizes short-term area under the curve, but kind of long-term area under the curve. And then the last area I really think about is what inspires the employee. You know, people come to Hasbro for a variety of reasons. It's a good company. It's got a great reputation. It tends to do well for the world. We've got a fantastic mission. We're all about bringing joy and community to people. It's very rare for me to go to a cocktail party and people.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brings me to, I think, the classic decoder question You have a lot of decisions to make obviously about structure, about new products, about which areas of the business to focus on. How do you make decisions? What's your framework”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, what are like the small companies doing or the new innovators doing on things like Kickstarter or e-commerce that are starting to take off with an audience and finding an audience? And if a large company like ourselves can either partner with that company, maybe even buy them if it's M&A or get inspired by what that product and category is, then we can pick up insights from that and learn from the trends.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you use data as an inspiration, but you shouldn't be shackled by it. It should be something that helps you understand what's working and what's not working. And then you should have kind of a tolerance for risk and an ability to test and learn very rapidly. And a lot of our data is around kind of like sharing new concepts with consumers, doing kind of rapid prototyping and small scale kind of A-B market tests and understanding kind of what hits and what doesn't hit. And then from that, then we can scale a product relatively rapidly, call it six to nine months from kind of detecting a hit and being able to scale it into something that can be quite big. And, you know, our data analytics doesn't just have to be what we do. We also, you know, we also can look at what other people do. So, you know, a great source of insight for us is what goes on on page three plus on Amazon products.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is another decoder trope, but it comes up a lot. Whenever you make a lot of database decisions, you're kind of trapped in the past. Like data can really only tell you about the past. And it just feels like there's a tension here between, okay, we've got a lot of franchises. They're very popular. There's a lot of natural extensions to those. We have a data platform that will tell us what our consumers want more of. And then 50% of the products are new every year, which is incredible for a market at 50% new products How do you balance that”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, everything good starts with a great understanding of your customer and of your consumer. And so most of our software development, I'd say the vast majority of it, is angling towards a better understanding of what our consumer wants and how best to deliver it to”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they, well, it would be, broadly speaking, it would be split up into three groups. You would have software engineers related to building games and building platforms. Those would be in product groups. Then you'd have IT-related software developers who build kind of like underlying systems. Like, you know, they manage our AWS cloud. They'd manage any proprietary servers, any kind of industrial grade software we get. and the vendors that go along with that like Snowflake or Snowplow or Tableau. And then you'd have a smaller team who would be on the data analyst side who actually would then code inside of those tools and create like proprietary analyst queries”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And are they organized as one group or are they split up, right? The people who are going to build the brand insights platform are maybe not the same as the people writing the code for the next monopoly game.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I would say I'm just looking off because I'm just doing the mental calculation between our IT teams and our data analytics and our software engineers for like building our direct platforms and our games. I would hazard to guess we probably have on the neighborhood of between 1,000 to 1500 software related engineers and product managers and program managers, people who touch code.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you have to have data analysts, you have to commission market research, you have to pay outside firms to help recruit people to come in for focus groups and playtests. You have to pay various analysts externally to help you understand kind of what trends look like. And the $100 million is over the course of like five or six years. So, you know, it's about $15 to $20 million a year, if not more. And then you have to build a bunch of systems. Some of them are off the shelf, but some of them are proprietary that you build in the cloud to be able to kind of crunch all that data and then give your employees access to it and make it easy for them to be able to ingest and be able to use in their daily work.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe in three years. Right now, it's still a lot of humans. Yeah. So it's basically the brand insights platform is a fancy way of saying how we put together all of our data analytics and market research.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you announced a strategy your investor in October that I think this all feeds into. You called it Blueprint 2.0. You've said the word blueprint a handful of times now One of the pieces of that blueprint was $100 million towards what you called a brand insight platform, which was supposed to help you make better decisions.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a lot. And then it all kind of, if it's like one of our quote unquote hero toys, then you do this very complicated volumetric testing where you get tens of thousands of people kind of like giving you feedback on a concept and a product. And that ultimately is what leads to our forecasting.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To kind of start building a composite of what's working and what's not working across a brand or across a toy or across a game.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have social media, we have fairly sophisticated proprietary market research like attitude usage and awareness studies that help us track like the performance of an upcoming film we do, tens of thousands of playtests per year with consumers where we bring in little kids, we'll bring in collectors, we'll bring in moms and dads and have them kind of experience a product in its early stages. We'll do mockups of retail aisles or we'll go into stores with partners and actually have people shop and kind of watch how they buy all of our digital games and like our direct platforms we're able to have you know understand what the clickstream looks like as people go through them what's kind of a heat map of places that people really enjoy inside of a game or spend a lot of time on what are some areas that are relatively cold or tend to kind of like are lossy in terms of people being able to play and we're able to ingest all of that together”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are talking about it, talking it up on social media. We have ways to be able to measure how much is positive, how much is neutral, how much is negative, who's sharing with who as much as we possibly can. Now, there are certain, that depends on the product line. Like if the product's going to like a six-year-old. We have a fair number of rules that prevent us from getting too deep. But if something goes after a 13 plus kind of audience, we have a little bit more flexibility to be able to learn and kind of track how our products are performing and how our brand metrics look.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, you have like NSAT. You'll have shareability, like viral kind of shareability. Like how much do people like Love It? How much do they share it with their friends?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And help enrich our partners, particularly our channel partners, making it a good opportunity for them and a fair opportunity for us. And then outside of that, you know, we try to take the gloves off and allow our innovators to innovate.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at all the toys. I definitely get to play with all the toys, and particularly, I get to play with all the games before we kind of go through the various stages of green lighting. But I mean, you know, we have a team of thousands of people who are experts at what they do, who help to kind of start with thousands of ideas and narrow them down to hundreds of concepts and then dozens of actual products that we ship every year in a given category. Plus, we work with like some of the best inventors in the world bringing in great outside ideas. probably will ship call it two to three thousand SKUs per year about half of which are new and over half of those are usually sourced from outside the company. So, you know, we try to create as big and wide a funnel as we possibly can. And from a management perspective, what we try to do is just provide priorities and then objective metrics about what we want to see a product be able to do and how we want to see it be able to delight a consumer.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To execute across both within our brands and have innovation inside of there, but then outside of our brands and the categories that we want to play in, because that's the best way to grow and the best way to kind of excite our fans.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are five categories that we want to be the best in the world in. We want to be the best play company in the world for preschool. We want to be the best play company in the world for blasters and outdoor play. We want to excel at games. We want to excel at action figures and we want to excel at creativity. And inside of those spaces where we have like kind of a category captain brand, whether it's Play-Doh and creativity or Nerf and Blasters or Monopoly or Magic or D&D for games, for instance, we give our designers a wide purview to be able to innovate and draw inspiration from. And if they happen to come up with an idea that maybe doesn't have a perfect fit inside of an existing brand, we have the capability to execute across outside of an existing brand. Toys are a space that every year, probably 50% of the category is brand new. Board games are very, very similar. And so we have to have the capacity.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our products really kind of drive how we think about our brands and the innovation and the customer understanding around those products, I think drives everything that we do as a company. So inherent in our business unit structure, the people who ultimately are in charge are the product designers and product makers, the creators across the company. They're the special sauce that I think makes Hasbro Hasbro and makes our products great play experiences and ultimately great brands. Marketing's important, sales is important, you know, supply chain and finance is important. But those just help to enable and expand these great play experiences. So the innovation ultimately started with consumer understanding coupled with passion for a space and passion for a product line. And what we try to do is we really try to make that as unbridled as we possibly can. You know, we say, hey,”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, as big as the brands are at Hasrow and his beloved as they are, at the end of the day, and this is probably my bias, I think we're a product company. A games company, an entertainment company, a toy company, we're dissimilar to a classic packaged goods company in that our products inherently have an emotional connection to people. They create kind of joy. They create community and socialization opportunities that something like toothpaste or toilet paper never really could, at least not on purpose. And so because of that.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we'll do some rude ones in the mix down the line. We just gotta. You're on peaks and valleys, right You've described a structure that's really good at getting value out of your existing big franchises. We live in a very IP driven world of SQL and expansions, but most people who I've told, hey, I'm talking to the Sea Hof Hasbro are like, I've got a great idea for a toy or a nerf gun. There's a sense that this is where people get to invent fun new things to play with. So where do Hasbro's new ideas come from?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's about the brands that we want to execute on behalf of that consumer. And then it's kind of like a bunch of executional nodes that we want to drive that we believe is important as a play company that's kind of turbocharged by storytelling. And really, that's what drives all of our decision making around kind of how we think about how we organize and where we think we can see efficiencies.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, you know, like obviously we took a lot of feedback from both that activist investor as well as from our investors as a whole. And I wouldn't say that our organization was led by any one particular piece of investor feedback or an activist feedback. I think our organizational model was led based on what our strategy is. And our strategy goes back to this idea of a blueprint. It's the center of our blueprint is the consumer and consumer understanding.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had an activist investor in your stock recently. You ultimately won that proxy battle. But one of the things I wanted you to do was spin off Wizards of the Coast and make it its own company, which is pretty easy to do if it's a division and it has some of that redundant functionality inside of it and pretty hard to do if you've got all these horizontal units servicing it. Was that any part of your rationale here? Like we should make this a harder idea to have?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And our legal functions because that just drives some verticality and specialty and a little bit of being able to cross reference resources.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a little bit of a hybrid approach. So, for instance, some of the horizontals report into the actual business units. So like, you know, wizards, like gaming is good at games. And so digital games reports into games. Toys relies a lot on partnerships, particularly for licensed partnerships and out of aisle kind of toy opportunities and licensing opportunities. So licensing reports into toys. So it's a little bit of like the business units are both their own P&Ls and their own business units, but then they also have like service elements as well. And then we have a centralized commercial organization that drives kind of like our distribution agreements, our relationships with our major retailers. They've got a team that specializes in direct businesses like we're developing with Hasro Pulse. We centralize our supply chains, driving that on a global scale. We centralize our finance teams, our HR team.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then let's empower these central functions that are very good at executing in entertainment. They're very good at executing with licensed partners and have them cross the brands and make them kind of services to help the business units expand what they're trying to do. And so to me, that just makes good business sense. It helps to drive kind of specialty and expertise. It helps us to be able to scale the business. And it helps us to be able to do it across a relatively standard matrix of executional opportunities and partnership opportunities, which just make it easier to drive a business at scale, Hasbro is like a $6 billion business. So driving things at scale and being able to drive it efficiently is really important to our success and to our shareholders.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business units, the PL. Let's give them kind of the be the Jiminy crickets for the brands, kind of like the heart and soul of the brands, thinking about like the consciousness of the brands.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's a couple things. I think first and foremost, when Wizards was a $450 million company, just to use kind of my own personal experience, our brands were big, but by gaming blockbuster standards, relatively smaller scale and relatively constrained audiences. And as we've doubled and tripled the size of those businesses and those brands, it's become apparent that those brands are bigger than just the primary game expressions they have. Our consumers want to be able to experience those in entertainment. They want to be able to experience those and kind of lifestyle merchandising. They want to be able to collect things. So rather than trying to recreate those functions inside of a business unit, which is pretty hard because you got to do the recruiting and it costs a lot of money, why don't we leverage that expertise that we already have across the business? And so from my perspective, let's give”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I say it secretly a show about org charts is I feel like the thing a CEO has the most control over is the structure of the company to get whatever outcomes they want. You were at Wizards. You operated in the old structure. You became the CEO. You're like, this is the new structure. What made you want to make the change?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The video games, licensing, entertainment, our channel execution, and then other kind of ancillary supports like experiences, location-based experiences, et cetera, and direct.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have this collection of brands who really focus on seven, which we call our franchise brands. And then we execute those brands across a blueprint of multimedia experiences that allows us to reach our consumers, segment them, and then engage and hopefully profitably engage them across a range of products, services, video games, channels, as well as entertainment and location-based experiences. And so the verticals drive the brands and the horizontals drive the execution across that brand blueprint, whether it's movies and TV shows, licensed partners, our channels, our direct assets like Hasbro Pulse, which is our big direct channel, as well as video games and digital services, which is partially what the Wizards team helps to drive.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say historically that we've run the business. And driving more commonality between the divisions. Today we have three divisions. We have games, toys, and entertainment. We're transitioning with the sale of the non-Hasbro related aspects of our entertainment division to two primary divisions, games and then toys entertainment and licensing. And then those will be supported by what we call five horizontals. So like think about the business units as the verticals, they house kind of like the brands. They drive the major product innovation for the primary expressions of those brands, which has row being a company, which is all about play, is the play experiences. And then these horizontals help to kind of support the brands across the various executions that we have, across what we call the brand blueprint, which is the strategy of the company. And the strategy of the company is basically, hey,”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Toys Games and Entertainment. We talk a lot about org charts in the show. It's like secretly a show about org charts. How are they arranged? They share a lot of resources at the top, or they mostly independent. You can see how most people's conception of Hasbro is you make transformers, then you make a transformers movie, and then that turns around into a transformers video game. And that's all Hasbro. But you actually have three different divisions that might be pulling in different directions and certainly experiencing different kinds of markets. So how tightly aligned are they?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And small, you know, they have hit reality series like Naked into Fraid, movies that they've been a part of like 1917 and Mrs. Harris goes to Paris and most recently The Woman King as well as television shows.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT