Today another blogpost on one of the marketing strategies that can make your campaign go viral: crowdsourcing. In this post, I will be explaining the crowdsourcing campaign by Frito-Lay called ‘Do Us a Flavour’ which was extremely successful and which created a total buzz around the brand. It was so successful that they made it a yearly event. You can find more about that later in this post. First, we will look into what crowdsourcing is and how it is used in marketing. Hopefully, at the end of this post, you will be inspired to use it in your next campaign. You can find my previously written blogposts here. Make sure to check them out if you haven’t yet. They contain some useful information, like the social media snowball effect, that I will not be repeating in this post.
Defining crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a relatively young marketing technique that came to life with the rapid growth of social media. Outsourcing, a term crowdsourcing came from, is something that we know longer. For years it has already been done by big companies that have been outsourcing manufacturing work to countries or companies that hold more knowledge about the manufacturing or that are simply a cheaper option than doing it in-house.
Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson came up with the term ‘Crowdsourcing.' The definition is as follows:
“The act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and large) network of people in the form of an open call” – J. Howe & M. Robinson (2006)
So, crowdsourcing is just like outsourcing, but then different. Crowdsourcing is most often applied to marketing.
The crowdsourcing process
There are four fundamental steps in the crowdsourcing process as shown in the model. The first step is the identification of a task or group of tasks that is currently done in-house, but that will be outsourced to a ‘crowd.' In the next paragraph, there are two types of tasks discussed related to marketing. The next step is where the crowd is performing the task that you set out. The step that follows is the step were the completed task is sent back to the company that set it out. You are receiving the task done by the crowd. Usually, you will get back many completed tasks, especially if your crowdsourcing campaign is going viral. You will have to evaluate all the completed tasks and pick out the best one. Lastly, the winner receives payment for successfully completing the task. This step is very important since there are some ethical issues around crowdsourcing. Find out more about the ethics of crowdsourcing later on in this blogpost.
Crowdsourcing Process
As might have noticed I skipped the intermediaries in the right process route. Intermediariesare (online) platforms for posting your task. You could also post it on your website and follow the left route with four steps. However, platforms have been proven to be more successful. Nowadays, with web 2.0, social media has become a huge platform that can support crowdsourcing initiatives. It is obviously not designed for it but it is a great platform to reach a big audience, and other can function as a platform in itself.
Moreover, there are three key roles in this process as shown in the model below. The requestor is you, the company that is creating the crowdsourcing effort. The requestor submits the request for a task to be completed to a platform and pays for the request. On the other end of the model is the provider, your crowd. They participate in the initiative, and they execute the task requested by the requestor. Lastly, the provider charges for the request. This all happens about the crowdsourcing platform, e.g. Facebook. The requestor and the provider can also directly negotiate over the criteria of the request and ask a question of one another to fine-tune the request.
Frito-Lay’s Do Us A Flavor
Frito-Lay (or in short Lay) has had multiple successful crowdsourcing campaigns called ‘Do Us a Flavour. I will explain the crowdsourcing initiative with the two models explained before. Lay – the requestor in this example – did the following.
Identification of task:
They asked the crowd, their Facebook fans – who are in this case the providers – to think of a potato chip flavor that they would buy but doesn’t exist yet.
Task performed by the crowd:
People started thinking of the flavor they would like to buy in the supermarkets.
Completed task is returned:
Lay created a Facebook app – which is the platform or intermediary – in which people could enter their flavor and design a package. Participants could also share their flavor via Facebook as well and get people to vote for the flavor. Some people even made a game out of it to think of a ridiculous flavor and post them all over Facebook. This boosted the exposure even more.
The winner is chosen and paid:
A selection of the most voted on flavors would go onto the shelves in the supermarkets. The flavor that would be bought most often would win the competition. This boosted Lay’s sales since everyone wanted to taste the flavors and support their favorite one. The winner would win one million dollars, and the flavor would go onto the shelves for at least a whole year.
Lay started out with this campaign in 2006, using submissions sent by mail. In 2012 it transformed into a social media buzz with the Facebook app. They gained massive numbers of new likes on Facebook and a lot of new customer insights. Watch the video below to see how successful this campaign was.
Advantages, Disadvantages
There is one big advantage to crowdsourcing, and that is that you can gain a very lager amount of creative ideas and useful information from different perspectives usually within a short time-frame and at reduced cost compared to performing the task in-house. Besides that, if we look at the Lay example, if it’s fun and engages a lot of people, it can make your campaign go viral.
“Sometimes crowds can be wise, but sometimes they can also be stupid.” – Jeff Howe
The many submissions with little relevance can create a lot of noise. A solution to this is that the company needs a way to effectively filter out the irrelevant submissions.
There are also some ethical issues that involve crowdsourcing. The gathering of competitive intelligence is one of the violations. Next to that, ‘click fraud’ – asking a crowd to click a certain add on a certain website to become more valuable as a website – is also violating the ethics of crowdsourcing. The biggest concern with crowdsourcing is asking people to do the same job for relatively little money that your well-paid employee would do. Therefore it is always important to have a fair payment for the ‘winning’ idea. The purpose of this blog is not to educate you about crowdsourcing ethics; I only want to point out the importance. If you want more in-depth information about crowdsourcing ethics, I recommend reading this article.
In Short
Crowdsourcing can be a very powerful and successful tool, not only to make your campaign go viral, but also to engage more people with your brand and to gain a lot of customer insight. Be aware of the ethical issues when you want to develop a crowdsourcing initiative yourself. You can easily do it yourself if you understand your role and the audience’s and if you know how the process works. Social media is a perfect platform for raising awareness for your crowdsourcing but also as a crowdsourcing platform on its own.
Are you excited to use crowdsourcing for one of your next campaigns? Let me know in the comments if this inspired you to do it yourself. If you have any questions or suggestions, I would love to hear them as well. Next week I will be posting my final blog post on viral marketing techniques. Make sure to come back and check it out.
