New Addition In Digital Marketing Mix
Unilever was recently in news for sacking Lowe, London, as the ad agency for its Peperami snack brand in favor of an inclusive strategy where the key lies in involving the consumers in the process of generating ad ideas. Although not a startlingly bold or original concept, it is interesting to see large CPG companies experiment with such emerging technologies and the new digital marketing mix.
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ coined by Jeff Howe’s June 2006 Wired Article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” is now extended and being used by savvy marketers to describe the concept of ‘crowdsourcing’ as a means to connect their brands with customers right from its innovation stage. Crowdsourcing provides clients with a relatively inexpensive, yet abundant check on ideas and helps garner insights from community thinking that may have been missed.
Until recently it was widely believed that crowsourced route would be taken up mainly by cash-strapped startup, small business or companies that need something functional, yet good. Larger companies that spend millions on their R&D, branding and marketing activities will continue to do so...through in-house or partner companies/ agencies. But the success of crowdsourced programs like Starbucks' MyStarbucksIdea and Dell's IdeaStorm are encouraging more and even bigger companies to use technology to make creativity a social activity that knows no geographic bounds.
It is in many ways similar to P&G’s innovative ‘Connect & Develop’ model, which would have been inconceivable ten years ago. A.G. Lafley goal for P&G to acquire 50% of their innovations from outside P&G challenged the company’s to reinvent its innovation business model and create “Connect and Develop” innovation model. With a clear sense of consumers' needs, P&G identifies promising ideas from throughout the world and applies its own R&D, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing capabilities to them to create better and cheaper products, faster. As was the belief, ‘crowdsourcing’ is not a passing fad - it is taking different forms, growing and creating a niche market space where new players are emerging, taking upon themselves the task of facilitating ‘crowdsourcing’ for companies. These companies are important because identifying the idea is just one part of the creative/ innovative product, finding a way to translate the diversity and brilliance of the crowd into the execution of the product is the key to the success of ‘crowdsourcing’.
I believe that ‘crowdsourcing’ is here to stay; it will grow and challenge the way companies have been approaching 'innovation' and ‘creativity’ traditionally.
