Last week, Marketing reported on Chevrolet's decision to crowdsource a new TV ad, and speculated on its wisdom in doing so. There's no reason it shouldn't work.
Through online intermediary Idea Bounty, the business will have access to thousands of creative people, including many currently working in agencies, conceivably its own. The senior team at Chevrolet can use that digital distance to be ruthless with the stuff that doesn't cut it, and ensure the final ad is a sparkling reflection of its new brand strategy.
A far more questionable practice is the one that many senior marketers are adopting to arrive at those upstream marketing decisions in the first place: let's call it 'in-crowd sourcing'.
This is the practice of involving numerous internal 'stakeholders' in decisions about areas such as brand positioning, brand strategy and NPD. Typically, these stakeholders will number about 20-50, and will include marketers from across the global territories, as well as cross-disciplinary representation from functions such as innovation, operations and HR.
With people scattered all over the world, emailing in opinions and after-thoughts at different stages, the process is rarely simple (I speak from experience). The reason senior marketers engage in it is a respectable one: they understand the necessity to carry people with them in their big decisions, and figure that's more likely to be achieved by involving them.
The downside is that the method virtually guarantees bland, colourless results. Why? Because the number of people consulted is at the worst possible point - neither tight nor huge. Ask 1000 employees for input and you can review the answers, gain a sense of the deep themes and motifs, and use that as fuel for a tight team to develop. One thousand is a crowd, and behaves like one: no one expects individual feedback, or wonders why the bee in their particular bonnet has been ignored.
An in-crowd of senior stakeholders, each making their opinions known under the gaze of colleagues and rivals, is another matter. This combustible mix of hierarchy, envy and insecurity, with its propensity to break into cliques, can present the chief marketing officer leading the initiative with a delicate problem. Do you make ruthless choices in the best interest of the brand and risk the lingering resentment of those who thought a different way; or do you merge things a little, and seek to accommodate all shades of opinion? Many senior marketers find it hard to make clean, apolitical judgements, and the result is a fudge.
What is the ideal number of people to make those important, high-order marketing decisions? The answer may still be a deeply unfashionable, almost politically incorrect, 'one'. In his new book, Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken celebrates the role of those in big companies who understand and drive a brand's connection with culture, which tend to be single individuals - Richard Branson, for example.
Like Ford and Kellogg from the last century, great brands today are often the product of a founder with impassioned views and a stubborn streak. Lorenzo Fluxa, the visionary behind Camper, named his shoe brand after the Catalan word for 'peasant' because he admired the earthy virtues of the rustic way of life. Imagine the input from a bunch of stakeholders to that.
The irony is that the market itself is a crowd, with brands jostling for attention. It takes a single-minded brand to stand out, and these are still, usually, the product of single minds.
Helen Edwards has a PhD in marketing, an MBA from London Business School and is a partner at Passionbrand, where she works with some of the world's biggest advertisers
30 SECONDS ON ... IN-CROWD SOURCING
It's not easy to get in-crowd sourcing right, and this can lead to committee-style decisions. Here are some tips for success.
- DO get the numbers right: 20 is too many. Go for a tight team of four to eight, all of whom represent a wider group or discipline.
- DO have a lead decision-maker. You will not agree on everything; that means someone, at some point, will have to make a call. Agree who it is, and that the rest of the team will support the decision.
- DON'T ask for 'comments': that will lead to a random offloading of 'today's thoughts', often followed up a couple of days later with 'a couple more thoughts I have had on this'. Structure the feedback, and ask specific questions that primarily relate to the stakeholder's area of expertise.
- DON'T ignore input: if you ask for it, you are either going to have to use it or tell people why you're not going to use it. The worst thing to do (and it happens) is to do nothing and delude yourself that the process of 'asking' is somehow part of getting buy-in.