WWYD: What Would You Do?
Crowd-sourcing is nothing new. As a prelude to this Sunday’s Superbowl, PepsiCo launched a contest during September of last year asking people to make a 30-second commercial showing their love for Dortios and Pepsi Max. Avid snack munchers naturally responded and they have created some ingenious ads that rival even the infamous Snickers commercial featuring Betty White. Here’s my favourite one (for Doritos):
High-profile companies like Amazon and PepsiCo are increasingly turning to us, the consumer for marketing advice! Crowd-sourcing is a highly interactive means of directly involving consumers with the brand. It often creates added value for the consumers as they are in a sense more invested in the product because well, they helped shape it! Before, companies never would have dreamed up of this because there was so little emphasis on the consumer – despite the adage “the customer is always right”. But now they aren’t content until we turn into their product slaves repeat customers (and hopefully eventual advocates of the brand). I think part of the reason why crowd-sourcing has the attention of major brands is that it is one way of generating additional value to the consumer without necessarily altering the existing product.
It doesn’t come without its own pitfalls however: imagine having to screen thousands upon thousands of entries from people! The company has to screen entries thoroughly just to make sure nothing that certain consumer groups consider “offensive” make it past their filter. Any negative publicity can spread like wildfire through word of mouth and if not capped/controlled, the company can face serious damage to their brand. There is some control with crowd-sourcing as there are screening mechanisms in place, but at the same time they can’t control exactly what you and I submit. Tricky!
Crowd-sourcing is not the marketing world’s panacea for all its problems. With anything these days, it comes with pros/cons that should be weighed against each other. PepsiCo however has used crowd-sourcing to their advantage with great results: the ad above could very well be the next great Superbowl commercial!
