According to Investopedia.com, crowdsourcing involves obtaining work, information or opinions from a large group of people who submit their data via the Internet, social media and smartphone apps. An example of crowdsourcing that took place a few years ago that I remembered seeing was with the chip manufacturer Lays. According to tweakyourbiz.com, Lays introduced a ten month long ‘Do Us A Flavor’ crowdsourcing campaign. It encouraged consumers to create their very own flavor of chip and people voted for their favorite. The winner, ‘Cheesy Garlic bread’ contributed to an 8% sales increase in the 3 months following its release. In the article “Crowdsourcing to Get Ideas, and Perhaps Save Money,” an important point was stated which is that “some of the best business ideas are inspired by others, leading more entrepreneurs to tap into other people’s brains — rather than just their pocketbooks — to test new products, set pricing and bring ideas to market faster.” This can be related to the Lays crowdsourcing example because they were able to quickly get new, fresh, interesting and most importantly free ideas for a chip flavor. Without the free help from their customers, the company would have had to spend a lot of money to create different chip flavors, test them out in their factories, and basically take a leap of faith hoping that whatever flavor they developed would be a hit amongst the public. Another important idea that was spoken about in all three articles is that not only do companies get to test new products faster and save money, they also get the opportunity to build customer loyalty. Involving your customers in developing new ideas and helping grow your business makes them feel special and portrays the company as open, welcoming, and customer oriented. Even if the products may not be the best out there, if customers know that they had some role in developing it, they will want to purchase whatever it may be at a higher rate. It was interesting that in the article “The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional,” Charles Murray had a post complaining that the New York Times paid him only $75 for op-ed contributions and he believed that he deserved more money because he is a professional writer. As a result of crowdsourcing, The New York Times could stop paying professionals for op-ed posts and instead get those posts for free from amateurs who are knowledgeable. The career of those who are professionals are in jeopardy because companies are quickly dropping them for regular people that will create new ideas, write posts, or test products for little to no cost. It has become a competition between the professionals and the amateurs and so far, the amateurs seem to be taking the lead. It is understandable why companies would want to save their money by going the crowdsourcing path, just like it’s understandable why Claudia Menashe in the article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” would jump at the opportunity to pay $1 for images instead of $600.
Feb 26