*supercollider

The first high profile examples of crowdsourcing, including Dell Ideastorm and My Starbucks Idea, were primarily focused on “being part of the conversation” and engaging their most passionate and vocal customers in a constructive way, with gathering great ideas to improve the customer experience almost just a fantastic bonus from the deal.

This year we’ve started to see some big-budget experimenting with crowdsourcing as integral to the marketing of the product itself. Here’s three examples:

Mountain Dew Dewmocracy

Mountain Dew’s Dewmocracy has employed a pseudo-MMOG, Forrest Whitaker directed web videos, and multi-stage elimination rounds to involve Dew drinkers in selecting the brand’s next soda flavour.

The end product is a consumer directed creation, from flavours through to name and marketing, albeit within carefully constructed boundaries.

With Dewmocracy, the marketing of the product is the creation of the product.

Walkers Do Us a Flavour

Walkers “Do Us a Flavour” campaign challenges spud fans to invent the next crisp flavour in return for £50k and a share of the profits.

This experiment in mass product concept crowdsourcing and pub-conversation inspiration is the biggest marketing push in the company’s history, with a £10 million pound budget that spans TV, web and retail.

They’ve passed the 800,000 flavour submission mark and are heading swiftly towards a million, making it easily one of the most successful user generated content campaigns of all time.

Best Buy Blue Label

Now Best Buy has launched a new sub-brand, Blue Label, with the tagline “Inspired by you. Powered by Best Buy.”

They’ve worked directly customers in partnership with Toshiba and HP to find out how to create laptops that will better meet their needs. So far they’ve factored in product enhancements like backlit keyboards and service enhancements like better support. And now they looking to involve you in the process, through their Blue Label forum.

It’s interesting to see Best Buy having a go at spinning the results of crowdsourcing as a premium, consumer-facing sub-brand.

“Best Buy Blue Label” sounds high-end (as much as anything with the prefix Best Buy can), and it’s not a coincindence. It echoes Ralph Lauren’s signature Purple Label line, and more directly Johnny Walker Blue Label, the whisky maker’s most expensive blend.

Those comparisons might be a bit of a stretch, but it’s great to see the continuing propagation and evolution of the crowdsourcing and customer co-design memes.

It’s encouraging to see that more and more businesses are looking to the web not just as another broadcast medium, or even as a place to get their messages distributed via consumers in social spaces, but as a place to connect directly with their customers to exchange and create value, and even to connect their customers together.

More on that last bit in a post on branded communities shortly!

Via PSFK.

Technorati Tags:
co-design, customer experience, differentiation, engagement, marketing, trend, crowdsourcing

A couple of days ago Faris suggested that we make marketing by doing “good things” the most important advertising trend of 2009.

It may sound like wishful thinking, but I think this is a hugely important trend, and it was one of the key pillars of the mini manifesto I launched this blog with back in February:

as increasing transparency is brought to bear upon corporations by the social web, as and the nature of marketing changes, consumers will demand more responsibility from companies, and vote for brands doing good with their wallets. Enterprises and agencies will be competing to out-do each other on the most innovative, effective, and attention-grabbing contributions to our collective welfare as a major competitive differentiator. The greening of brands a prime example of this, but there is a lot more still to come.

Since then there’s been a proliferation of high-profile cause marketing, with American Express Members Project, Google Project 10, Häagen-Dazs - Help the Honey Bees and Orange RockCorps showing both the diversity of causes available and just how much scope there is for companies and agencies to innovate, using their marketing budgets to bring some good into this world and benefit from the brand halo in return.

Now Brand Week is reporting that two new surveys indicate that cause marketing is not just good karma, but contributes directly to the bottom line, with 79% of survey respondents saying they would switch brands to the one that is associated with a good cause (assuming product price and quality is the same), people spent longer reading cause marketing related ads, and after being exposed to cause marketing ads sales went up anywhere from 5% to 74%.

Where products are essentially undifferentiated, cause marketing gives consumers a powerful reason to choose, much more so than essentially meaningless claims like “now 10% whiter!”.

It’s a fantastic concept: companies increase sales, people feel good about supporting the causes they believe in, and the wider world benefits from the extra exposure, dollars and brainpower being funneled towards helping good causes.

Some tips to get started with courtesy of the study mentioned in the Brand Week article: Eighty-four percent of those polled wanted to select their own cause, 83% said it must be personally relevant and 80% said the nonprofit associated with the brand matters.

Technorati Tags:
campaign, cause marketing, differentiation, green, innovation, marketing, preference, trend, value