Hasbro plans to 'reimagine' brands for digital world

Pawtucket toy company emphasizes partnerships with Marvel and Electronic Arts in bringing products to "lifestyle" formats

...“[Last year] was the best year in the history of the company,” [Current CEO Alfred] Verrecchia said, promising that the company would “stretch the boundaries outside traditional toys and games.”
[Incoming CEO Brian] Goldner then outlined a product development that will continue to “expand and contemporize” the company’s traditional toys and games, such as G.I. Joe, Littlest Pet Shop, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit...

...Hasbro will use partnerships with Marvel Entertainment and Electronic Arts, as well as its own development team, to bring products to movies, animated videos, online and on mobile devices, he said. In some cases, those efforts will be based on characters developed by its partners, such as the upcoming Iron Man and Hulk movies and related products. In other cases, they will be based on Hasbro products, such as G.I. Joe, which will be the subject of a movie due out next year...

...For instance, video gamers will find more than a dozen Hasbro-related titles in stores this year, including a “Nerf Blaster” game, which makes use of Hasbro’s foam-shooting toys, he said. For use with the popular Nintendo Wii video console, players snap the console’s controller into the Nerf toy...

...Sales of Littlest Pet Shop toys for girls soared to $600 million, from $60 million, in five years and the company will debut an online version of the popular collectibles — Virtual Interactive Pets, or VIPs, he said.

The company will continue to look for “adjacencies,” or products that aren’t traditional toys and games, he said.

One such “adjacency” was the introduction last year of Tooth Tunes, a battery-powered toothbrush that plays a song when in use. Consumers in the United States snapped up 5 million Tooth Tunes brushes last year, Goldner said...