The business of
marketing is in the midst of a massive cultural shift. While buzzwords like
co-creation, mass-collaboration and crowdsourcing are all the rage, there’s
actually a much bigger and deeper change going on with the way work gets done. Three disruptive forces: the expectation of transparency, the further
digitization of the workforce and the rise of the curator class, all coupled
with the current macro-economic conditions, have changed the world of marketing
forever. Like it or not, from
professional creatives to consumers, people want to be involved with your
brand.
The exciting thing is you can take advantage of the new tools being developed
in this new age. Just look at the exposure Doritos received from its
crowdsourcing efforts. Two weeks after
the Super Bowl the four Doritos spots owned the post game marketing
conversation. Together they had
nearly 18 million views, or 40% of all Super Bowl ads online.
The tide is shifting quickly. How
can you thrive in this new paradigm? Brave brands, including Doritos, have
begun to knock down their marketing walls and explore the world of abundance. They are discovering that there are many
ways to do it:
1. Starbucks, Dell and Best Buy have all set up idea
marketplaces that allow customers to share their product innovation and
marketing ideas. This is a great
way to open the flood gates to let people play with your brand. Get ready. They’ll love it.
2. Cisco has involved customers to produce its latest Flip
video commercials. Consumer
generated videos worked well for Flip because of what it is, but it can work
for anyone. Your customers have
the tools. Let them tell the story.
3. LG used Crowdspring to engage a large community of
consumers and designers to design a new cell phone. What a great way to get new ideas in the product design
process.
4. And, Unilever dropped its agency Lowe and used
Ideabounty.com to crowdsource its TV spots for Peperami. They wanted more ideas and more value. In fact, they loved what they got so
much that they awarded an additional prize-winner.
Every day there are new tools that emerge that allow you to collaborate with
people on current social media networks, from Facebook to Twitter, or their own
community. The key is to use the
right tool to solve the right problem.
It’s only the beginning.
So, how do you use the mass collaboration and crowdsourcing tools available to
build more momentum for your brand? How do you manage the unruly and talent rich crowd, while
maintaining the speed, flexibility and cost savings of the new digital
ecosystem? Here’s what we’ve been
learning about doing marketing in this new world:
1. Focus on connecting with your consumers - While pundits
love to point out the failures, there are already many successes. Mystarbuck’s ideas
is a good case in point. What
started out as a small way to capture product ideas from customer’s has become
a major driving force for Starbucks’ innovation. Two years into the project the brand has received more than
80,000 suggestions, hired a staff to deal with such an outpouring of
involvement and turned 50 of the suggestions into innovative products that now
sit on the shelves of stores. But, most of all Starbucks turned customers into passionate
fans and got them involved in the brand. Follow Starbucks’ path. Get customers involved, listen to what
they want and engage them in innovation. Start to experiment.
2. Develop strategies that can inspire great work from a
crowd of creatives, strategists and consumers – You have to play an active role
in working with any crowd. Writing a strategic brief for a crowd is much
different than writing it for an internal team. You have to not only write a
great brief, but also participate in an ongoing dialogue as the work moves
along.
3. Focus on getting more people involved – Look for ways to broaden
particpants, from customers to top creative and strategic talent. Use social media, from Twitter to
Facebook, to create more momentum. But remember, it’s great to ask for participation but that
goes two ways. Many people think
of social media as a broadcast tool. It’s not. It’s the start of a
conversation. We can all learn
something from Barry Judge, the CMO of Best Buy. He’s out there blogging,
tweeting and participating in a conversation. He solves problems and gets feedback from his followers.
4. Focus on ideas – Open Source marketing and crowdsourcing
allows for an overwhelming number of ideas to be developed to solve your
marketing or product design problem. To keep up with the volume, the very structure of marketing
organizations must change. The
mentality has to become more iterative.
There are lots of
different ways to play with crowds. You can start by running a project on one of the public crowdsource
platforms, such as Crowdspring or Innocentive. These platforms are great to get mass participation, but they
rely on you to write the brief and creatively direct the crowd. Another way to go, especially with more
strategically sensitive projects, is to use a smaller, private crowd, which is
a strategy we’ve implemented with a lot of success.
While it’s anybody’s guess what the precise future of marketing will be, one
thing is for sure: This new model of marketing can be seen as a threat to what
you do or a powerful force to distance yourself from your competitors. This new model no longer tries to
control the brand but recognizes that a brand exists in the collective
consciousness of culture. In this
new model, guidance and inspiration go much further than command and control.
