When Crowds Lend a Hand
Finding a winning creative idea is a major effort, but the true endeavor is turning the business idea into an actual business. New developments in marketing thinking can provide help. According to the latest ANA Recession Survey, which records the attitudes of advertising buyers, for 84% of chief marketing officers today the challenge is to cut marketing investments while increasing their effectiveness. One strategy is about outsourcing and sharing some marketing activities while leveraging the willingness of people to participate, online especially. The magic words are crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. In the former, companies make use of the collaboration of passionate experts and consumers in creating marketing processes, such as the communication or development of new products and services.
All the first ten brands in the 2012 Interbrand rankings have developed brand names, product launches, and communication campaigns, by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing. More and more brands rely on consumer buzz to communicate their products, by letting more enthusiastic customers experience products in advance. In certain cases, this has doubled the rate at which consumers try out new variants and product lines. It is out of crowdsourcing that Threadless was born. Threadless is the biggest e-commerce site for user-designed t-shirts; each week more than one thousand original graphic designs made by common users are submitted to visitors of the site, who rank them so to pick the ten best t-shirts to be produced and sold all over the world.
It is not only small companies or unknown brands that are tapping into collective creativity. Last June, Poste italiane launched a competition on Zooppa.com to gather video advertisements and promotional graphic designs for Paccoweb, the new online package shipping service, offering a €13,000 reward (well below what it would have paid an advertising agency) to winners. More than 500 graphic ideas and more than 50 videos were sent.
Crowdfunding has enabled millions of individuals with great intuitions, but without a major corporate backer, to turn ideas into businesses. Rocket Design (rocketdesign.it) was founded by a Bocconi graduate and a former financial analyst. It is a firm specialized in interior design and accessories inspired by rock music culture. Their financing proposal, posted on the equity crowdfunding site SiamoSoci (siamosoci.com) raised €100,000 in 48 hours: an absolute record, for the Italian context.
The creators of Coffee Joulies, heat-absorbing steel pebbles that keep coffee temperature constant, have gotten their initial funding thanks to Kickstarter, the US platform to fund creative projects which is the largest in the world. They raised more than $300,000 (and they aimed at initial budget of $9,500...), the third-largest sum ever collected through the Internet site. The Web has thus liberated voice, talent, inspiration, giving everybody the chance of being an entrepreneur and providing companies with new ways to innovate with the help of consumers.