The All-Inclusive Crowd

One of my favorite new finds from the last few months, Edward Boches, recently offered me this encouragement: “Read. Think. Write.” I’ve been knee-deep in his first two objectives on this controversial topic, primarily in the advertising, marketing and design worlds for the past few months. Here goes the third.

Crowdsourcing isn’t new. It goes back way further than this, but 10 years ago, the rap/rock band Korn, decided they had a strong enough following to which they would entrust their next album design (Issues). A winner was selected, the reward was seeing your design in every CD store in the U.S., and the band accomplished what they set out to do: they empowered and connected with their community.

In the past decade, technology and platforms have been developed that allow the community to mobilize around a brand or product much quicker and in much larger numbers. I won’t stay at the surface but for a few lines here, but social media has spawned a new trend…and that’s probably an understatement. Social media allows consumers to freely comment on, discuss and ultimately change the brands they care about. Once brands realized this, why wouldn’t they take advantage of this new, powerful crowd?

From a marketing standpoint, the benefits are twofold as I see it:

1. Empowering your consumers builds a stronger community. It’s Social Media 101.

2. Marketers can’t help but notice the financial appeal. Everyone has access to these design communities via platforms such as CrowdSpring or 99Designs. Hopefully your agency offers more value than production design or development because marketers can get hundreds of design submissions or open source contributions for next to nothing. That should make you a little nervous.

Obviously, “benefit” number 2 is where the controversy lies. The trend is drifting into the scary zone for agencies and designers who fear that some of their services are becoming commoditized. Some agencies will protest; some will embrace it. Crispin Porter + Bogusky caught quite a bit of backlash, offering a mere $1,000 prize for a logo contest for Brammo. They received almost 800 submissions and a lot of pissed off designers who started a Twitter rebellion. Fact of the matter is, CP+B and Brammo probably received the PR they were hoping for – the only explanation for such a pathetic reward.

Agencies are going to be forced to embrace this, ensuring that they offer A LOT more value to their clients than development or design. Those that fight it are going to get hurt.

There’s your intro. Here’s my contribution:

*I’m working under the assumption that you’ve quit trying to fight or deny crowdsourcing and have embraced it as a potential value-add for your clients.

Here’s the question you have to wrestle with: do you ethically approach the topic or do you use it, using the design and development communities in the process? I may have been a bit leading in how I posed that question, but let me build some context around it.


Chipotle, a brand I’ve always admired, recently closed their mychipotle.com video crowdsourcing campaign (sidenote: this entire campaign is under the guidance of Chipotle’s national agency of record Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners). On the surface, what they set out to do is an example of crowdsourcing at its best. Similar to MyStarbucks or Dell’s Idea Storm, they created a platform on which their community could engage and contribute to the brand. Good so far. They initiated a video contest, asking members of the community to create a story around their favorite burrito. Still looking good. Up to this point, they’ve utilized crowdsourcing for the first benefit I listed above. They have a unique and strong enough brand with which their community wants to engage. Rightfully so, they let them.

Here’s where it starts getting messy.

I had lunch with a regional marketer for Chipotle a couple of months ago. As an ad guy, of course I would love the opportunity to work with a brand like Chipotle, but my primary purpose for the meeting was to make the contact and learn a little bit about their regional strategies. I didn’t bring up a potential partnership once, though this woman knew me and my agency. As we wrapped up lunch (at Chipotle of course…and no pun intended), she smiled, shook my hand and…wait for it…suggested that my agency create a video and submit it to the contest. I thanked her for the lunch but won’t be having another one in the near future.

I checked out the site after our meeting and read the fine print. Chipotle owned the rights to every video that was submitted…not just the winner.

Chipotle and BSS&P had the community, the platform and the contest idea to do something really great and strengthen their community. But they screwed it up. (1) By inviting (or even allowing) agencies to participate, they didn’t make it about the community; they made it a way to take advantage of people and save some money. (2) They further took advantage of the crowd by claiming rights to all video submissions, whether chosen or not. I don’t even have to explain how messed up that is.

Chipotle, sorry to burn you. I love your brand, your stores and your food. But you messed this one up. And to be sure I’m staying consistent with my comments on Ben Kunz’s Starbucks rant, I searched for an opportunity to privately provide this feedback and couldn’t find one.

Summary: Crowdsourcing has tremendous benefit in strengthening community loyalty to a brand; it can also be abused. If you haven’t yet, embrace it, and start thinking about why your clients need it, but be sure you do it the right way.

Lessons Learned from Zappos

I’m a little late on this. The headline of the day that I should be discussing is Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, but my mind is still focused on the news of Amazon’s purchase of Zappos for a cool $800M. I’ve never made a secret of my admiration of what these guys have accomplished – Zappos and Crispin Porter + Bogusky references have become commonplace at my agency. Now this broke about a month ago and has certainly been heavily discussed, but I’m that guy at the end of every meeting who asks the question, “what are the takeaways?” or “what are our action items?” (you can imagine the look of disdain I get from my wife when I tell her we’ll have to “sync-up” later or take this conversation “offline” – oh what have I become?)

First, I think it’s important to mention, briefly, that Amazon purchased a brand for $800M. They didn’t need the fixed assets or the shipping relationships…they wanted a brand. An $800M brand. A brand defined by uncompromised customer service and a strong internal culture. What’s new about that? Is it really that simple? I believe the answer is yes. What makes Zappos unique is its unwavering commitment to these values. CEO Tony Hsieh put a stake in the ground. For some it pays off, in a BIG way. Here’s what I take away from Zappos’ success:

Obvious alert: Every interaction with your customers matters. If you’re not committed to ensuring every touchpoint is a positive one, you may not only lose a customer, you may find him writing a song about his negative experience with your brand that gets millions of views on YouTube.

You can win with the best tech or product; you can also win by actually caring. Zappos sells shoes. Shoes! But they’re passionate about their business model from the top down. My guess is they’ve passed on some brilliant people that weren’t necessarily passionate about what they were trying to do.

It’s important that the best want to work for you. I’ll be singing songs about the importance of internal culture when I retire. These guys got that and were committed to implementing it.

A strong internal culture is a pre-condition to a true customer service commitment. This one is my favorite. I’ve seen it reaffirmed over and over again, and Zappos is just the current poster child. Starbucks is another huge brand that has always been committed to this idea. How many times have you been shocked at how much those baristas seem to love their job? It’s not because they went through a class teaching them how to smile and interact when they were hired. It’s because Starbucks has created a culture those baristas are proud to be a part of (all employees referred to as “partners”, benefits for part-time, etc.). I’m not going to do the search, but I’ll venture to say there aren’t many profiles on Monster or CareerBuilder that show current employment by Zappos.

Great investments are often immeasurable. Hold back the verbal assaults digital marketers; this just isn’t going to change.

Good people > good processes…EVERYTIME.

Great leaders have to be willing to commit and make decisions consistent with that commitment. Enough said.

This is obvious but rarely emphasized:

Strong culture leads to happy employees who fit into that culture leads to higher productivity, better customer service and better ideas. Not a bad end result.

Am I overstating? Not taking enough variables into account? Being idealistic?