The Marketing Conference Blog

You’ve heard of open-source software in which "volunteer" programmers around the world collaborate on a piece of software code and release it to the community free. The "open source" model is also influencing other industries from bio-tech to marketing and product innovation. It’s sort of a "Wisdom of Crowds " approach to business.

Consider for a moment how most advertising or marketing campaigns get developed. A marketing decision-maker in a firm has a goal to increase revenue. Using all her best training, she (if she’s one of the better marketers…how many campaigns get launched without any research or feedback?) holds a few focus groups, interviews salespeople, and consults with market data to develop the message, the reach plan, the "offer", etc. She most likely works with an agency to build the creative and launch.

Even if she took the next disciplined step and tested the campaign first before launching (only a fraction do), it’s still a top-down, controlled approach to building a campaign. What would a customer-centric, community-oriented "open source" approach look like?

For one, the customers themselves could have been asked to share their ideas on what the company’s campaign should look like. What would customers like to hear the company say, and how? Perhaps a contest from customers on campaign ideas, which would be released to the customers to decide the winner?

While it’s true that most customers would not participate, the most passionate fans of the firm probably would. And after all, they tend to be the advocates who want the firm to succeed anyway and influence many others on your behalf.

The recent Inc. Magazine has a great article on innovation that highlights Threadless , a t-shirt company whose entire business model rests on community participation in the design of new t-shirts. From the article:

Threadless, he explained, ran design competitions on an online social network. Members of the network submitted their ideas for T-shirts — hundreds each week — and then voted on which ones they liked best. Hundreds of thousands of people were using the site as a kind of community center, where they blogged, chatted about designs, socialized with their fellow enthusiasts — and bought a ton of shirts at $15 each. Revenue was growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company had never advertised, employed no professional designers, used no modeling agency or fashion photographers, had no sales force, and enjoyed no retail distribution. As result, costs were low, margins were above 30 percent, and — because community members told them precisely which shirts to make — every product eventually sold out. Nickell’s company had never produced a flop.

Interesting model, one that requires a lot of faith in your current and potential customers. Many will react to this with a cynical eye, thinking this could never apply in their industry (especially highly technical categories). But I suspect that it applies to almost every industry, at least to some level.

Why not run a small pilot in your company with this approach?