Crowdsourcing Pushes Brands Beyond the Norm
Crowdsourcing is when a brand uses groups of people (or platforms) to gather information. To use in simpler terms, it is when someone throws a party and tells other people to bring a snack or drink to contribute. In this case, the brand is the host of the party and the people bringing food and beverages are the contributors to that brand’s campaign or “ask” for that time.
Laureen Miles Brunelli wrote that “by crowdsourcing, companies can tap into a huge group of people’s expertise and skill sets, ensuring diversity of thought, expedited production, and cost-cutting, since they don’t need to hire new, in-house employees.” Crowdsourcing is advantageous because it is not limited to the brand’s employees, it fills the knowledge gap and offers a different way of thinking by gathering information from people who are not directly associated with the brand.
Brands continue to reap the benefits of crowdsourcing by finding “unexpected solutions to tough problems, reduced management burden, more marketing buzz, faster problem solving [and] customer-centric data.” Two brands that have successfully utilized crowdsourcing are Lay’s with the “Do Us A Flavor” contest and Starbucks with the White Cup Contest.
Do Us a Flavor
Have you ever thought of a chip that might be really good if it had [fill in the blank] on it? PepsiCo, which is over Lay’s chip decided to explore that option with consumers from around the nation. They “first launched the ‘Do Us A Flavor’ campaign in the United States in July 2012 with a pop-up store in Times Square showcasing its current 22 Lay’s flavors.”
The campaign was created for consumers to submit a flavor they would like to taste with the potato chips. In order to accompany the campaign, PepsiCo created a Facebook page to have participants put in submissions for flavors. Consumers were incentivized that if the submission is the “the winning flavor [he or she] will win $1 million or 1% of the chip flavor’s sales for that year.” After users submitted their proposals, they would receive a “Lay’s bag customized to reflect their submitted flavor. Participants could then share their Lay’s image on their social media platforms.”
Who doesn’t love a good contest where you can win $1 million?
PepsiCo took advantage of living in the age where consumers are able to talk to brands. Lay’s brought the campaign to the most popular social media platform in 2012 — Facebook. They understood that brands need to meet people where they are at. Ease of access it a big reason why I believe this campaign was successful. Users did not have to click out of the social media site to visit a third-party website, which could try to capture their information before they are able to submit a proposal. They kept it simple and received more than “3.8 [million] submissions.”
Beyond the incentive and the ease of access to submit a flavor, this campaign was successful. By creating this campaign, PepsiCo was able to brand out with flavors that may not have been conceptualized otherwise. “Lay’s garnered 1.26 billion PR impressions and their overall sales increased by 12%. They also gained major consumer insights. For example, they discovered that 72,000 people included the color red in their flavor names, and only 3 people included beige.”
Following this campaign, “the winning chip flavor, Cheesy Garlic Bread, drove an 8% sales increase for Lay’s in the three months following the competition.”
White Cup Contest
Created in 2014, Starbucks announced a contest for consumers “in the U.S. and Canada to decorate a Starbucks cup with customized art, take a photo of it, and submit the design through social media using #WhiteCupContest.” This contest allows for users to submit their proposals through social media platforms to enter, specifically Twitter and Instagram.
This contest was created to promote an environmentally friendly campaign to eventually purchase the $1 reusable cups to reduce waste. By purchasing a reusable cup, “customers [would] receive a dime discount for each refill in the cup, so it pays for itself after 10 uses.”
Consumers who participated in the contest were incentivized that the chosen design would “be made into a limited-edition reusable cup, and [receive] a prize of a $300 gift card.”
As a result, “the contest generated nearly 4,000 entries in just three weeks.”
This campaign was successful because Similar to PepsiCo’s campaign, it meets consumers on the platforms they are already using. Most importantly, they used social listening to create this campaign. It has been reported that this campaign started “because Starbucks employees were paying attention to what their customers were doing and saying. Customers were doing this, posting these photos on social media, and Starbucks listened to them.” Leaders did not have to create a campaign because this contest fell in their lap.
We have learned that the best contests are the ones generated by listening to the consumers. Brands and companies can receive invaluable marketing insights by branching out to people outside of the company. These campaigns would not have been so successful if they conceptualized the products and asked for users to select the best item. It works because they valued the voice of the people.
