Creativity Unearthed!

The voice and interaction between firms and consumers have changed from top down to bottom up. Customers now have more options and more say in the brands of products they consume. With the emerging trend of firms offering personalized experience for customers, crowdsourcing is what firms use now to engage consumers. Nowadays, consumers do not solely participate in purchasing  and consuming the products but have also become co-developers of personalized experiences for the firms; almost every firm’s businesses involves some elements of crowdsourcing.

There are a few successful crowdsourcing campaigns in the past. The conventional ones are Doritos Crash the SuperBowl Campaign and Pepsi Refresh Project that focuses on social community effort. Firms seek ideas from the community for their plans on product inventions, corporate social responsibility and so on. However, the number one reason for firms to participate in crowdsourcing is to engage consumers into their brands.

However, an effective crowdsourcing campaign takes time and effort during planning in order to achieve the desire results. To achieve an effective campaign, you need to choose the right audience and placing the campaign on the right channel. Crowdsourcing action has  to link with the brand and products you sell. Appropriate incentives should be provided as well.

I came across  Coca Cola’s Blank You Very Much crowdsourcing campaign recently, its voting deadline was last week. Looking into this Coke T-shirt Design Campaign, I was surprised by the small number of entries for this campaign. There are only 117 design submissions, the top three designs that receive the highest vote were around 950 votes.

Considering that Coke is a universal brand, my personal thoughts on this campaign is that it did not go well due to the smaller reach of audiences. One of the reasons of lower reach to audiences is low sharing and engagement among people. Also, I assume that people are not into this campaign because it does not have much association with Coke products, it is a T shirt design campaign that does not have anything to do with Coca Cola beverages. But who knows what is the underlying purpose of this campaign? Maybe Coca Cola wants to target just this group of people for their creativity in logo creations.

The video above is a crowdsourcing campaign in May this year done by McDonald’s Germany. There were 116000 burgers created by people, 1.5million people voted on their ideal burgers. It was indeed a successful crowdsourcing campaign that managed to engage McD’s customers strategically.

The campaign was a success because the action was strongly associated with the products. Creating your ideal burger all in one and having it available in McDonald’s outlets if it receives the most vote. Who would say NO to that? Also, it was easy for customers to participate in the campaign which is just a few clicks away on their laptops. It is hard to measure the effectiveness of this campaign (to trace sales? impossible as McD’s sales are always high). However, by just looking at the submissions and votes, we can say that McD Germany has successfully engages customers in this campaign.

Crowdsourcing is another way of “listening” to your community. McDonald’s can look into the ingredients where people submitted the most and gear their new menus towards that direction. Instead of doing the conventional way of listening and monitoring, why not listen in to audiences when they tell you what they want easily through crowdsourcing?