*supercollider

Customer co-design initiatives like the Lego Factory, MUJI Award, Uniqlo UT Grand Prix have over the last several years successfully engaged a small but passionate group of professional and aspiring designers to help generate the concepts for their next range of products.

Now, one major FMCG brand is attempting to reach and engage their entire audience base this way, and scaling both the investment and reward to match.

The UK’s #1 crisp brand (that’s potato chip for my North American brethren) Walkers has just launched Do us a Flavour, inviting consumers to submit their ideas for the next flavour of Walkers crisps.

The mechanic is simple: submit your flavour idea to Walkers, including a name and picture of your inspiration. A panel of judges will pick six finalists, all of which will be created and go on sale. Over five months, the public will vote for their favourite flavour via mobile or online, and a winner will be announced.

What really caught my attention was:

• It’s Walkers’ biggest ever campaign in their 60-year history, with a projected spend of £10m across PoS, radio, online, and television.

• The prizes are massive. All five runners-up get £10,000, and the winner gets a one-off prize of £50,000, as well as 1% of all subsequent sales of their flavour.

1% of all future sales. I have no idea what this would amount to, but Walkers claims over 11 million people will eat their product every day, so on face value that would seem to potentially be a massive prize.

Credit to Walkers for realizing the amount of talkability that will generate. I can see the pub arguments right now, with off-the-cuff calculations of the enormous wealth to be received when my Blue Cheese and Prosciutto crisp takes the prize.

Overall I think it’s a great concept, as imagining and submitting bizarre combinations of flavours sounds like something that would appeal to tipsy pub goers anyway, and the reward takes it to a whole other level. The campaign looks well executed, from the choice of flavour mad scientist Heston Blumenthal as the head judge down to the great line of “Do us a Flavour”.

The scale is what sets this apart though. Walkers is coming off the back of having their Brit Trips promotion give them the fastest growing website in the UK and clearly believe consumer engagement is the way forward, and have pushed all their chips in on this one.

I’m really interested to see how this all plays out, and interested to know if you think this type of crowdsourcing is a simply fad, or if the trend in customer-driven product development is simply going to keep getting bigger and more important across all industries.