Crowdsourcing …12 Examples of How Brands Crowdsource for Ideas
Everything you are exposed to makes a connection. It is how you put them together that makes things interesting. Are you noticing the increase in numbers of brands experimenting with crowdsourcing?
Let’s start but agreeing on a common language of this technique. Crowdsourcing is a method for bringing people together to inspire, create and solve problems.
Though it can take a lot of moderation and feedback, there’s a ton of benefits that far outweigh the negatives when it comes to crowdsourcing. It reduces cost, increases your options and scopes for creativity, and there’s often much less work involved.
Does your company do crowdsourcing in any form? Have you done any recent reading or research on crowdsourcing design? We follow this topic quite closely and have researched and written several blogs on the subject and the businesses that employ it.
Lots to learn from Stephen Shapiro and his blog on innovation.
Based on our recent crowdsourcing research, we decided to group brand examples into three categories:
Consistent users and believers
Limited users, likely to keep trying
Rare users, little success, unlikely to go further
Related post: Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Let’s examine the best examples in each category:
Crowdsourcing … consistent users and believers
My Starbucks Idea
Starbucks has been the most long-term participant in brand crowdsourcing, and the most successful in our opinion. They regularly encourage consumers to submit, view and discuss submitted ideas along with employees from various Starbucks departments.
They even have a website dedicated to this very purpose, which includes a leaderboard to track which customers are most active.
Experimentation and social media together with customer engagement and market research results in a cocktail that has made the brand excel.
The My Starbucks Idea website, where Starbucks does itsbusiness crowdsourcing, has been actively engaging customers for over eight years now.
It encourages customers to submit ideas for better products, improving the customer experience, and defining new community involvement, among other categories.
Lego is another company that we follow closely because they are so creative. A toy company, Lego is responsible for probably one of the best examples of crowdsourcing we’ve seen.
The company allows users to design new products, and at the same time, test the demand. Any user can submit a design that other users can vote for.
Their business model is simple: any user can provide a product design, which other users will be able to vote for.
When a submission racks up 10,000 votes, it gets a formal stage-gate review, and unless legal flaws or other showstoppers are identified, it moves into production. And the creator receives a 1% royalty on the net revenue.
Waze
One of the most successful crowd-powered start-ups is Waze. Waze is all about contributing to the ‘common good’ out there on the road.
By connecting drivers to one another, they help people create local driving communities that work together to improve the quality of everyone’s daily driving.
That might mean helping them avoid the frustration of sitting in traffic, cluing them into a police trap or shaving five minutes off of their regular commute by showing them new routes they never even knew about.
After typing in their destination address, users just drive with the app open on their phone to passively contribute traffic and other road data.
They can also take a more active role by sharing road reports on accidents, police traps, or any other hazards along the way, helping to give other users in the area a ‘heads-up’ about what’s to come.
It’s a great app that proves a dedicated crowd is sometimes all a company needs. It also attracted some big-name investors and suitors.
Samsung
Even some of the big brands such as Samsung realize the value of Crowdsourcing. Samsung has the largest Crowdsourcing facility in Palo Alto.
What they seek from others is innovative solutions for existing electronic products and technologies. They also seek collaboration with other firms and interested individuals.
Samsung partnered with product development platform, Marbler to crowdsource ideas on how they could utilize newly discovered patents from NASA.
They offered users the chance to help create the company’s next product and earn a share of revenue along the way.
Airbnb is another good one.
Airbnb
You could say that Airbnb’s whole business model is based on crowdsourcing – it’s essentially a travel website that allows individuals to let out their homes all over the world.
Founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone or tablet.
Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for a month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries
More recently, they teamed up with eYeka and worked on a crowdsourcing project that asked filmmakers from all over the world to create a home. The videos had to be 60 seconds long, and the winners win a share of 20, 000 euros.
But this isn’t the first time they’ve crowdsourced content. In 2013 they asked users to submit scripted shots from all over the world in the form of Vines, via Twitter. They then put the clips together, named it Hollywood & Vines, and used it as a TV ad.
Crowdsourcing examples … limited users, likely to keep trying
McDonalds Burger Builder
In 2014, McDonald’s decided to give their customers free reign and submit ideas for the types of burgers they’d like to see in a store. They could create their perfect burgers online, and the rest of the country could vote for the best ones.
The fast-food giant is drawing upon one million different combinations to choose from just to start. The top five burger designs selected will be sold in stores across the United Kingdom
In Germany, creators were also encouraged to create their campaigns, which included viral videos and other valuable content marketing, which of course cost McDonald’s nothing.
Once the winners were crowned, McDonald’s released the burgers weekly, along with the picture and short bio of the creator.
Unlike Starbucks though, it’s unlikely that this scheme is intended to generate serious revenue. It is the perfect market research tool and a good public social media campaign. Crowdsourcing has the advantage of acting as a product development tool.
In this instance, McDonald’s can gauge how their customer’s appetites are developing for customer-designed food items
Lays
The chip manufacturer certainly reaped the rewards of their ten months long ‘Do Us a Flavor’ Crowdsourcing campaign. It encouraged consumers to create their very own flavor of a chip and just like the others, people voted for their favorite.
This type of crowdsourcing is one of the most common among food product developers.
Greenpeace
Another of the easier and most traditional ways of crowdsourcing is to crowdsource for ads. Greenpeace turned heads when they crowdsourced environmental activist quotes for their Shell Oil “Let’s Go” advertisements.
They ran a contest to get controversial, sarcastic and satirical quotes from their followers and then used them on advertisements targeting oil company, Shell.
An example for you, “The ice caps won’t melt themselves, people. Let’s Go.”
An awesome way to engage your supporters, isn’t it?
Crowdsourcing marketing … Heineken and package design
From ideas about sustainable packaging to insights into what consumers age 60 and over would like to see in beer packaging—lots can be learned from IdeasBrewery.com.
A press release from Heineken piqued my interest because it described how that firm used a dedicated Web site called IdeasBrewery.com to leverage crowdsourcing in its approach to innovation generally and to package design in particular.
Fisher-Price
Fisher-Price utilized a crowdsourcing strategy to develop two new characters for its Little People, a toy line featuring a variety of characters that reflect a child’s community members.
By soliciting ideas for new characters directly from their social community, Fisher-Price was able to create two new characters in about four weeks at a fraction of the cost – and because the ideas came directly from Fisher-Price customers, they are much more likely to be successful.
As a bonus, in addition to the huge cost and time savings from crowdsourcing, the brand, like many others, saw a significant lift in engagement and loyalty during the crowdsourcing campaign.
Rare users, little success, unlikely to go further
NASA
In 2012, NASA faced a proposed budget cut of $226 million jeopardizing the launch of a Mars orbiter in 2016 and two rovers in 2018. Enter crowdsourcing. Rather than shelving the project, NASA turned to the genie of social media to seek assistance in designing shrewd technology – on the cheap.
More than 400 responses were received and in 2013 a panel sat down to assess the quality of the data.
Whether the results were utilized is yet to be ascertained; however, the point of the exercise is a valid one. Just because you are asking for information from the general public, it does not mean you are always going to get an overwhelmed public.
In the end, it is rocket science, and the crowd responded.
Sam Adams Beer
Sam Adams, the American beer company, used an interactive Facebook application to engage fans for inputs which permitted them to create a custom beer.
This is another example of how businesses are using social media market research to engage and solicit feedback from customers and extend this engagement to crowdsourcing product and services.
They have demonstrated some very creative crowdsourcing ideas with this campaign.
Titled ‘The Crowd Craft Project’, Sam Adams consumers were able to give feedback on the company’s latest offering, commenting on some categories used to describe the drink such as color and body.
The most popular categories as selected by Facebook fans were then used by the company’s brewers to develop the new drink.
The bottom line
Lots of ideas here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business? How could you improve these concepts for your business?
Have any other company crowdsourced examples to offer?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.It’s up to you to keep improving your business innovation process and efforts.
Lessons are all around you. In some cases, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. Or collaborating with you. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
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Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
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More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
