by YannigRoth

One brand, different platforms (Part 1) Danone builds on geographic diversity

The world is too fast, complex and networked for any company to have all the answers inside

Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth Of Networks

It is the mantra of open innovation advocates: go find outside what you’re unable to figure out by yourself. What started in the scientific field with success stories like InnoCentive or NineSigma, now spreads to product development and marketing. Companies source more and more ideas directly from consumers, with online platforms being the only intermediary, with the logical consequence of an explosion of web-based platforms. Today, distinctive positionings emerge within this new competitive landscape (which is a situation of healthy competition, I think) and brands don’t hesitate to leverage different platforms for different purposes.

This series of posts sheds light on a couple of brands that use that platforms’ in a complementary manner. This week, I take a look at Danone, for which I identified three different co-creation platforms.

logo-big

Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Money-making platforms are rare: the cost of co-creation

screenshot

When Hyve retweeted Sense (two renown co-creation consultancies), I thought the information must really be interesting. And it was. A report about Winning and Failing Co-Creation Platforms which compares 20 different platforms by interest, community scope or interaction tools.

Even though the report does have some flaws, its conclusion is very insightful and concludes that “money-making platforms are rare“, which is perfectly true. To generate cash, companies either have to sell community-output (like Quirky or Local Motors) or make big companies pay for using the platforms (like eYeka or InnoCentive). Co-creation, Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing… all these iniatives bear costs that can’t be neglected ! Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

The IDEO shopping cart (1998) wasn’t a failure, the concept was just ahead of its time

I remember writing a blog post about another IDEO concept: Shimano Coasting. Their concept was supposed to make cycling attractive for the masses, but it eventually got dropped, what led my to question about the possible reasons for this failure. This post, is about a well-documented IDEO case: a shopping cart developped in 1998, that obviously didn’t make it to the stores… or did it? Actually it did, it just has been picked up more than a decade later, and it’s being rolled out here in France. Not by IDEO. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Crowdtap’s Brand Influence metric: my questions

puma-head

Few people will commit to a brand like this little boy... but how to measure brand influence?


I am a passionate reader of FastCompany.com and its design pendant FastCoDesign.com (and I advise you to have a look at it, very inspiring!). Right after publishing a blog post the difficulty of classifying crowdsourcing actors, in which I placed CrowdTap as an example of good measurement/metrics, Fast Company published an article about their last innovation: the Brand Influence Metric. Brand Influence (“the cross-channel metric for marketing impact“) measures the power of any marketing action to impact consumers’ advocacy of the client’s brand and willingness to purchase its products. Does this metric usher a new era for marketing metrics or is it a proprietary metric with limited broad impact? Some questions…

Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Why classifying the actors of crowdsourcing is so difficult

crowdsourcing_infographic

Click on the image to download a large version

A couple of months ago, the website crowdsourcing.org released a neat infographic called the 2011 Crowdsourcing Industry Landscape. It gathers various websites and companies which leverage crowdsourcing as a business model. This post is not about discussing whether crowdsourcing is an industry or a work process, I just want to clarify this taxonomy, based on other sources and my humble experience. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Does crowdsourcing for communities (rather than for companies) make sense?

article-le-figaro

The "Untergunther" underground movement: (illegaly) restoring old monuments of Paris (image via http://web.mac.com/peint/UGWK/Untergunther_Presse.html)

A couple of months ago, I blogged about community brands (not brand communities, which tend to have three distinct traits: (1) members share rituals or traditions, (2) there’s a sense of community, of belonging to a special group so that (3) community members feel morally obliged to help each other). A community brand uses the inverse approach: they emerge from spontaneaous and informal movements, mainly because they grow and gain visibility, so that they have to adopt some kind of unique identity (Cova, Louyot-Gallicher & Bonnemaizon, 2011). Examples are the Slow Food movement, the Burning Man festival or the Couchsurfing community. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Former Threadless CTO gives 5 tips for building communities

screen-capture

Here’s a very interesting and inspiring talk by Harper Reed (“Probably one of the coolest guys ever“), former CTO of the pioneering t-shirt company Threadless. Threadless is a community-based company that crowdsources t-shirt design and selection, which means that people can (1) submit designs, (2) vote designs up/down… and (3) buy t-shirts! As more and more companies try to leverage communities, let’s listen at someone who succesfully did it. See the (funny) video after the break. Continue reading →