Product Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing

How many times have you said, or heard someone say, “If I owned that business I would _______”. Customers have opinions and complaints about how a product could be improved, and product co-creation and crowdsourcing do just that by allowing consumers to interact with a business and share their ideas. This is an amazing concept, because not only does it allow a business an opportunity to get direct feedback as to how they might be able to improve their product (something that can be very tricky to track by other methods), it also builds value in the brand by creating customer loyalty. “Customer loyalty is a fragile concept in a world where customers are only a mouse click away from a better deal”, according to an article entitled “Co-creation: A new source of value” on Kambil.com. Customer loyalty is extremely valuable and hard to gain and retain in the world of the internet. Personalized experiences produced through co-creation influence the user by giving them an emotional connection to the brand. Linux is an excellent example of product co-creation as thousands of programmers worldwide have contributed code to enhance the system.

Crowdsourcing is the concept that a business outsources some job or activity to an unknown group of users. Crowdsourcing can be a fun way for consumers to interact with a brand, for instance, LEGO developed the Digital Designer where a user can create and their own LEGO designs. On the other hand, crowdsourcing can be an exciting way for ideas to spread and innovative creations to come to fruition. According to Mashable.com, “Crowdsourcing is distributed problem solving. By distributing tasks to a large group of people, you are able to mine collective intelligence, assess quality and process work in parallel.”

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The two concepts, Product Co-Creation and Crowdsourcing, are so closely related that it is hard to differentiate them sometimes. Essentially, co-creation can be thought of as collaborative new product development, whereas crowdsourcing can be thought of as encompassing that idea, but also it is a broader idea in that the “crowd” could be contributing in various other ways. For instance, they could be helping promote the business by creating their own fun commercials or helping to build audience and brand loyalty through story sharing. To sum it up, both crowdsourcing and co-creation are complementary and similar ideas that can help a brand to grow and thrive in exciting ways that were not as easily achievable before the digital age.