The Wicked Type Heard Round the World - Startups vs Corporate

Wicked dot com vs Wicked Movie dot com. Pretty close, right? Not close enough. This typo on movie merchandise drove a porn site’s traffic to a 12-year high and Mattel’s reputation to a short term low. Only took one QA workflow error.

My doctor asked me about this scandal. I mentioned it would cost a fortune to clean up the mess and that “heads will roll” aka scapegoats will be fired. I contrasted it to startups where it likely wouldn’t be as big a deal perhaps merited as a PR stunt as long as retailers didn’t cut them off.

My doctor said “you’re so right”. I was amused because I rarely hear that from my wife and kids; and, it reminded me that while I have worked in both Corporate and Startups, many have not and are intrigued by the stark differences.

In Corporate, we protect massive shareholder value. When facing tradeoffs between risky growth and safe status quo, they’ll choose the latter 99.9% of the time to protect the prize. In the case of Mattel, follow the licensing playbook QA steps for Wicked merchandise and generate the predictable revenue. The playbook was violated, an embarrassing mistake happened, and “heads will roll”.

In Startups, we fight at all costs to create shareholder value. When facing tradeoffs between risky growth and less risky growth, we choose both. If there’s a mistake, it means you’re trying hard. If you don’t take big swings, you never win big. In the case of Mattel, sure you’d be furious but you’d also consider the publicity "benefit" for your lesser known brand.

Then there's motivation of Retail vs Ecommerce and Corporate vs Startups. Every URL is an opportunity to drive engagement, acquire first party data, and learn about attribution engagement source. For Wicked, was the exclusive focus solely retail revenue? Was this a Corporate move where staff ran the playbook indifferently? If this was a Startup program, would they have agonized over the URL and overall experience to yield a much higher return on investment?

Startups can take more risks and thus Corporate outsources innovation to them. Corporate may pilot a partnership, invest, and ultimately acquire them but won’t take the existential risk. Startup Founders fight for innovation with their life savings, emotional stress, reputation, etc… It’s brutal & lonely, but deeply rewarding if you persevere and are lucky enough to win. Media doesn’t feature this side of Startups because Unicorns are more glamorous.

Corporate isn't easy either. It’s a different set of skills. Protecting billions or trillions in shareholder value requires discipline, high stakes decision making, navigating massive cross-functional matrices, managing massive teams, etc… And deciding which startups to acquire 😉

Hopefully Mattel can embrace its former Startup - lock down their workflows better, and heads don’t have to roll. Let's see what happens…