In 2006 Jeff Howe, Contributing Editor at Wired, hailed crowdsourcing as the future of business decision making but it’s experiencing a negative reputation of late. Here Stephen Wise, Managing Director of global co-creation platform eYeka, explains the advantages of consumer social co-creation.
Experts from across the marketing industry are in heated debates as to whether, as a discipline, crowd-sourcing has any place as a discipline in the marketing toolkit. Although this form of outsourcing is coming under attack, the longer term benefits of consumer social co-creation and participation marking should be highlighted. There is evidence of many brands having enjoyed immediate success simply by opening up collaboration to a social online community.
Social co-creation is simply the next level of crowd-sourcing, which is focused on integrating consumers into strategic brand development and enabling brands to create authentic content.
Within the consumer haven of MyStarbucks or Dell's Innovation community, brand advocates spend hours posting suggestions, improvements and ideas for free, and revel in their ability to contribute to a brand’s output, promote their status as a Starbucks super-consumer or to be viewed as an extension of the product innovation team at Dell. Here the focus is on long-term involvement, with the principles of crowd-sourcing offering a portal to treat consumers as partners – and one who has real value to an organisation.
Brands that place consumer collaboration or co-creation at the heart of their business culture are crowd-sourcing different levels of expertise and engagement and accepting that each consumer is unique in what they can bring to the table.
For brands who wish to see long-term, tangible results from inviting consumers to participate, a social co-creation strategy will enable them to partner with brand advocates and build lasting relationships with a community of influencers, who in turn will support strategic brand development, insight, and innovation.
The key to social co-creation is about creating deep strategic partnerships with consumers and producing authentic content that can be referenced and applied internally or externally (once it has been approved and voted on by the community to filter out any off-brand material). Further, social co-creation allows for far deeper consumer engagement both amongst the creative community and the wider breadth of global consumers who hang-out on the brands social media channels.
Consumers within a creative community are engaged and willing to participate. They are able to create content that is dynamic, rich and thoughtful that feeds across all aspects of the business: from marketing to PR to customer service and product innovation.
Social co-creation enables consumers to very quickly be turned from brand enthusiasts into valuable advocates, where they will actively recommend brands because they feel a part of its development and its values. Our experience also suggests that consumers who are invited to collaborate with a brand will be willing to develop an on-going relationship with them. Brands should therefore jump on the opportunity to enlist consumers to become a part of their extended business.
Social co-creation encourages mutual partnerships where both parties are equally valued and the consumer feels involved in the business.
A good demonstration of the use of social co-creation is Foot Locker: They ran a campaign with the objective driving consumer engagement around FootLocker's tag line "It's a sneaker thing" - demonstrating they are the No.1 destination for sneakers and getting some of the biggest sneaker fans to advocate this message. The concept was based around a video co-creation contest giving the public the opportunity to have their video featured on MTV. The brief to find the biggest sneaker fan, (demonstrated through a 30 second video to show how much you love your sneakers) was seeded with a co-creation community and consumers. This resulted in 100+ consumer created videos being produced, enabling Foot Locker to engage its wider brand enthusiasts through a voting campaign on YouTube. The winning video was broadcast on MTV earlier this year.
Social co-creation and co-innovation is probably most valuable amongst Gen Y. They are digital natives who are glued to their mobile phones and computers. They multi-task incessantly and have limited concentration spans. Overtime, they have become immune to traditional advertising and have learnt to switch-off instantly if the slightest whiff of a sales pitch comes on to TV, or attempts to interrupt them on Facebook whilst they are socialising with their friends.
However for marketers they are a golden opportunity. Brands that can get their attention long enough to sustain a valuable consumer relationship will reap the benefits of being able to follow Gen Y through to studentville; adulthood and later into their late 20s/ 30s when family responsibility looms large.
Co-creation and co-innovation offers a new way of engaging Gen Y online and the key to sustaining life-time brand loyalty.
Gen Y’s who feel valued as a consumer are far more likely to talk about their involvement with the brand to their peers, influence others and spread brand advocacy that can be leveraged continuously.
Brands such as Mercedes–Benz and Coca-Cola have made the transition inviting Gen Y consumers to become a part of their business, through co-creating and collaborating on product innovation or insight.
Earlier this year, Reebok worked with global social co-creation platform eYeka and its community of creative consumers on a co-innovation and co-insight campaign, to gather ideas on how it could extend its product range for girls and women. The brief asked the community to stretch their imagination and think of the brand ‘beyond sports shoes and clothes’ to create a design, sketch, drawing, picture, text or description of a new product Reebok could come up with to market to women aged 18-25 years old.
Within two weeks of posting the campaign, the community had responded with over 700 images, mood-boards and product descriptions – that stretched the brand into some exciting and new areas such as online services, content, food and drink, motherhood, and relaxation.
Ideas produced by the community offered both tangible consumer and product insights which the product and brand teams were then able to analyse internally, in order to understand how they could meet Gen Y needs better and where they could take Reebok for girls, next.
In an effort to secure loyalty from notoriously fickle and brand-promiscuous Gen Y'ers, who also happen to be still spending despite the recent recession, brands from cars to fashion, to toothpaste, are opening their doors to consumer participation and inviting consumers to contribute in new product development, consumer insight and innovative research projects.
We have worked with brands across the industry spectrum to help them use a pool of active creative consumers to generate content, drive internal strategy, product innovation and market insight – however, this is just the start of the social co-creation process. The brand must use this creative spark to trigger engagement amongst their wider brand enthusiasts: Inviting their enthusiasts and fans to get involved in this process through engaging, testing and responding to the content produced which can be achieved by seeding output from the community across social media channels.
Stephen Wise
Managing Director, eYeka
Twitter: @Stephen_Wise