Crowdsourcing for Marketing Success

Unlock the power of collective intelligence with crowdsourcing, a game-changing strategy for marketing success. Dive into the world where customer insights meet innovation, and discover how this collaborative approach can revolutionize your marketing efforts.

Crowdsourcing

The term “crowdsourcing” was first defined in 2005 by the editors of Wired magazine to describe how organizations began leveraging internet users to outsource tasks

• Over the years, the notion has been defined in a variety of ways (e.g., crowdfunding, crowdvoting, and crowdsolving) with specific application to business, government, and nonprofit organizations’ innovation efforts
• Several Journal of Marketing Research articles have sought to add insight to the crowdsourcing discussion
• Specifically, researchers have examined how to manage innovation crowdsourcing to optimize success probability in the context of online platforms and innovation contests

Crowdsourcing has become an essential instrument in every marketer’s toolbox

Although putting a brand in a crowd’s hands poses risks, the benefits prevail when the firm implements crowdsourcing judiciously

• As it pays to market products as crowdsourced, marketers should find effective ways to communicate their efforts

References

Boudreau, Kevin J., and Karin R. Lakhani (2013), “Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner,” Harvard Business Review, 91(4), 60-9.

• Hofstetter, Reto, Darren W. Dahl, Suleiman Aryobsei, and Andreas Herrmann (2021), “Constraining Ideas: How Seeing Ideas of Others Harms Creativity in Open Innovation,” Journal of Marketing Research, 58(1), 95-114 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720964429)
• Kohler, Thomas, and Thomas Kohler (2015), “Crowdsourcing-Based Business Models: How to Create and Capture Value,” California Management Review, 57/4 (Summer), 63-84
• Nishikawa, Hidehiko, Martin Schreier, Christoph Fuchs, and Susumu Ogawa (2017), “The Value of Marketing Crowdsourced New Products as Such: Evidence from Two Randomized Field Experiments
• Ramamurti, Ravi, and Song (2020), “Global Crowdsourcing Can Help the U.S. Beat the Pandemic”
• Song, Xiaobing, Jihye Jung, and Yinlong Zhang (2020)

Managing the Crowd for Success

Stephen, Zubcsek, and Goldenberg (2016) have investigated the role of social networks in facilitating innovation in crowdsourcing platforms

• They showed that a high level of interconnectivity between the social network defined on a crowdsourcing platform could negatively impact innovativeness among ideas produced
• The authors advise that firms can attenuate the issue by explicitly instructing crowdsourcing participants not to rely on other customers’ ideas for inspiration

Communicating Crowdsourcing to Consumers

Recent research by Nishikawa and colleagues (2017) shows that labeling new products as crowdsourced can improve market performance.

• The research suggests that crowdsourcing’s positive effect is not ubiquitous, and marketers are best served by the approach if it resonates with their target consumers and fits their product context.

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