*supercollider

Less than a month after release of Best Buy Blue Label, a crowdsourced PC programme created in conjunction with HP and Toshiba, Intel and Asus have launched WePC.com, a…well…crowdsourced PC programme.

It feels kind of awkward, like when you get two movies about animated bugs, exploding volcanos, Wyatt Earp, or collision course asteroids coming out at the same time.

Unfortunately for Best Buy, in terms of current implementation, WePC.com’s web 2.0-tastic site is definitely the blockbuster to Blue Label’s straight-to-video forums.

In terms of how this has come about, as in Hollywood it’s fair to assume there’s some idea appropriation going on in Silicon Valley.

However this is also a manifestation of two important trends in marketing being seized upon by companies in a very competitive market, who are hunting for an edge of differentiation. Like most brands, really.

Crowdsourcing as a key tool in product innovation

Crowdsourcing is increasingly being explored as an important tool for innovation in areas as diverse as book publishing, science, and product design.

Apple might disagree, saying innovation is giving the customer what they want before they know they want it. This sentiment was expressed most famously by Henry Ford, who said “If I had asked people what they had wanted, they would’ve said faster horses”.

There’s definitely truth in that, and companies will obviously continue to innovate from within, using their best and brightest to push the edges of their industries.

But many organizations, even at the leading edge of their industry, suffer from a degree of homogeneous and insular thinking. Outlier ideas can prove to be valuable, and to get those you need a variety of different points of views from different sources.

Quantity is also important — it might give you a better shot at stumbling across something new, but it also also gives you an aggregate view of what people want and where their interest lies that can be useful in itself.

Crowdsourcing as a core component of product marketing

Crowdsourcing as a core component of product marketing was the theme of my recent post about Mountain Dew Dewmocracy, Walkers “Do us a Flavour”, and Best Buy Blue Label.

These campaigns and initiatives are using crowdsourcing not just as a source of product and service innovation, or even as a way of engaging consumers around the brand. They are using crowdsourcing to sell product back to consumers.

In this case WePC.com follows down this road, but unlike Best Buy they’ve not launched with crowdsourced product in hand, though there’s the hedged promise of something that “could” come of all the ideas in the future. Instead they will recommend you the “Dream PC’s of today”, and let you know what influencers from various hardware sites would put in theirs.

I think as a consumer it’s still an interesting and novel thing to be asked by big monolithic corporations to participate in product design, and the chance to have your ideas come to life is intriguing. However Intel and Asus need to keep on the right side of the line on this one, as right now some aspects of the proposition feel like a bit of a bait and switch.

Where product and marketing crowdsourcing is going

With all the product design crowdsourcing initiatives going on out there, from Nokia to Starbucks to Muji, it seems like this is the next wave of UGC. We’ve moved a little ways on from “create an ad for me” to “create and market my product for me”.

It’s a potentially powerful way to engage consumers and harness their creativity to create real value. But just like the legions of lame user-generated content initiatives brands have choked the web with, it’s entirely possible that crowdsourcing will become trivialized by brands and used as a marketing gimmick before they even begin to explore it’s real potential.

In a post in the near future we’ll have a look at who’s doing this right, and try and distill some principles for success. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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co-design, crowdsourcing, innovation, trend