Crowdsourcing - Involving Customers as Co-Creators

Collective intelligence is gaining importance as they tend to perform better than the theorists can explain and are better for idea generation than for idea evaluation. Thanks to recent technologies, including many Web 2.0 applications, one can now tap into “the collective” on a greater scale than ever before. Indeed, the increasing use of information markets, wikis, “crowd-sourcing,” “the wisdom of crowds” concepts, social networks, collaborative software and other Web-based tools constitutes a drastic shift in the way that decisions are made. Collective Intelligence can help mitigate the effects of biased thinking. For instance, it can provide a diversity of viewpoints and input that can deter self-serving bias and belief perseverance. Diversity can also help combat pattern obsession and negative framing effects. Because of those and other benefits, many companies have begun to tap into collective intelligence.

Examples of Crowdsourcing

Lay’s “Bachega Sirf Tastiest” Campaign

Lay’s ran a campaign “Bachega Sirf Tastiest”. It is a classic example of Crowd-Sourcing done in main stream advertising at a large scale. Lay’s asked Indian consumers to suggest new flavor Ideas for their chips. Lay’s crowd-sourcing did not stop at collecting the flavor ideas, but even the best flavor were decided by consumers. Of all the entries received, 4 of them were shortlisted by panel of judges and these were piloted in the Market. Eventual winner was decided by consumers, who voted for the best flavor. While the four selected entries each won Rs 5 lakh, the winning flavor fetched the entrant Rs 50 lakh and 1 per cent of the sales turnover. Lay’s used Web 2.0 applications like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter extensively for its campaigns.

Designing a symbol for Indian Rupee

Indian Government also got into the crowd-sourcing mode and announced a creative contest for designing the new rupee symbol. Over 3300 eligible entries were received for the symbol for new rupee. A five-member panel chose IIT post-graduate D Udaya Kumar’s design from among five shortlisted symbols and recommended it for Cabinet approval. Indian Govt. thus used crowd-sourcing approach to get a design for the Rupee symbol.

Deciding Title for a Movie

Sudhir Mishra uploaded a clip of his movie on Facebook and asked people to choose a title for his film. Based on the verdict of the voters he decided on the title "Yeh Saali Zindagi" for his movie.