مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

A phenomenon relatively new to management and marketing, crowdsourcing is gaining increased attention in both the practitioner and academic communities (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2013; Hossain & Kauranen, 2015; PotatoPro, 2015). Although the concept of sourcing ideas and feedback from the public has been around for centuries (DesignCrowd, 2016), the term crowdsourcing has only existed for a decade. Introduced by Howe (2006, p. 1), crowdsourcing is defined as ‘‘the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.’’ The strategic applications of crowdsourcing in recent years have been broad and varied, including idea generation, microtasking, open-source software, public participation, citizen science, citizen journalism, and wikis (Hossain & Kauranen, 2015).

There are many recent examples of firms employing crowdsourcing to generate user feedback and create marketing concepts. One such example is Frito-Lay’s Do Us a Flavor campaign, designed to crowdsource new potato chip flavor ideas from customers. A number of top vote-getting concepts were put into trial production by Lay’s for public testing and feedback. Launching the campaign as a contest with a $1 million prize for the creator of the winning flavor, Lay’s has accumulated feedback via its online platform from over 14 million individual customers since 2013 (PotatoPro, 2015). By crowdsourcing product development, Lay’s concurrently engaged customers in a normally secretive process and gathered critical market research at a fraction of the traditional cost. And by choosing the winning potato chip flavor based on public votes, Lay’s not only gathered market data beyond what was generated through the original crowdsourcing project, but also essentially guaranteed a successful product launch.

Crowdsourcing can be a powerful tool for brands because of its ability to empower brand communities. Allowing brand communities to make decisions that influence image and product offerings in a controlled and planned way can have powerfully positive effects, as did the Do Us a Flavor campaign. Crowdsourcing is a fount of mutual benefit for firms and consumers: Users receive benefits in the form of economic reward, social recognition, self-esteem, and/or the development of a skill, and the crowdsourcing firm benefits from the advantage of what the user has brought to the table in terms of the activity initially proposed (Estelle´s-Arolas & Gonza´lez-Ladron-de-Guevara, 2012). And yet, by definition, the firm’s ability to control crowdsourcing activities is limited. Once a crowdsourcing campaign has been released to the public, the firm has little ability to rein it back in should the projecttake a negative turn. This reality is magnified by information sharing on social media and online platforms, where even a small number of negative contributions can drastically alter the conversation about a brand. Consider the 2012 McDonald’s Twitter hashtag campaign, #McDStories, designed to share information about the restaurant chain’s suppliers and to allow customers to share their own McDonald’s stories publically. Unfortunately, the hashtag was hijacked quickly via tongue-in-cheek messages about disease, food poisoning, weight gain, injuries, and questionable supply chains (Lubin, 2012). Having no control over the public domain of Twitter, all McDonald’s brand managers could hope for was a quick end to the trending topic.