Crowdsourcing for branding and marketing

Since the coining of the term 'Crowdsourcing' by Jeff Howe in 2006, it has been a popular concept. The term describes a web-based model that harnesses the creative power of amateurs or a distributed network of individuals (the crowd), through an open call for solutions and proposals.
In this era of the internet, the web most often provides the perfect platform for extracting crowdsourced ideas, solutions, and tasks.
Organisations often fear in acknowledging the fact that the best solution to their problem does not lie within their walls. Sometimes, knowledge generated by crowd, which is outside the boundaries of the company, can flow into the firm and prove valuable in exploiting market opportunities. This concept is known as open innovation. Crowdsourcing has emerged as an important tool for open innovation.
Professor Henry Chesbrough puts forward the idea of open innovation in his paper titled 'Open Innovation: the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology'. It was published by Harvard Business School Press (2003). According to him, open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external path to market, to advance their technology. Therefore, crowdsourcing is one particular manifestation of open innovation.
James Surowiecki (2004), in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, examines several cases of crowd wisdom at work, where the very success of a solution is dependent on its emergence from a large body of solvers. Based on certain empirical investigations like - from estimating the weight of an ox to the Columbia shuttle disaster- Surowiecki finds that 'under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them'.
Thus, 'wisdom of crowds' is derived not from averaging solutions but from aggregating them. Based on crowdsourcing business model organisations incorporate crowd wisdom for problem solving, idea generating and innovation. Given below are a few cases of different types of crowdsourcing practice by organisations.
Proctor & Gamble Company (Crowdsourcing type: Crowd wisdom)
Based on the philosophy of open innovation via crowdsourcing, Proctor & Gamble Company has decided to connect with the most innovative minds in the world to develop products that improve consumers' lives. Their innovation mantra is to collaborate and co-create with the best available talent anywhere in the world. Crowdsourcing approaches allow researchers of P&G access a wide pool of talent.
 As a result, their research and development is not limited to innovative solutions from in-house scientists. Even though many companies are still clinging to the idea that their innovation must principally reside within their four walls, the innovation landscape is changing fast around the world.
Proctor & Gamble occupied 5th position in Fortune magazine's most admired companies list in 2011. Since 2000, the company has re-invented themselves and achieved high growth and rising sales by adopting the philosophy of 'connect and develop (C&D)'.  The C&D theme at Procter and Gamble is based on the strategy of open innovation (with crowdsourcing acting as a tool to harness external knowledge). The company aims to collaborate and co-create with a number of entities or parties anywhere in the world in order to create value. P&G focuses on connecting and developing primarily to tap into the innovation ideas of the individual innovators, small -- and medium-sized business partners, universities, spin-offs, corporations, capability and service providers, government-funded R&D organisations, suppliers, competitors, retailers etc.
This is basically crowdsourcing as the company is trying to identify, collaborate and harness the ideas of innovators anywhere in the world.
"Our vision is simple. We want to be known as the company that collaborates- inside and out-better than any other company in the world," says  CEO, A.G. Lafley, The Procter and Gamble Company.
Indiegogo (Crowdsourcing type: crowd funding)

IndieGoGo was founded in 2008 with the aim of providing people with an opportunity to get funding.  It is based in the United States and has members in 174 countries. The company provides a platform to raise fund in a collaborative way. It offers anyone with a good idea to be creative, connected or entrepreneurial- the tools to effectively build a campaign and raise money.
The company provides integrated social media tools and facilitates the usage of them in order to get funding. It promotes campaigns through social media and press outreach, besides their homepage newsletters and blog. IndieGoGo is an online platform for anyone to raise money fairly quickly. One can use it to create one's campaign, promote an idea and engage a fan base. It provides excellent customer service for creating campaigns and collecting money.
The aim of IndieGoGo is to democratize funding. Hence, basically anyone with a great idea has the opportunity to publicize and share his or her campaign and can turn that passion into reality. The criterion for idea selection (in this case project selection) is that all campaigns have a targeted funding amount or total amount to be raised. The incentive that is offered to the crowd (i.e. the contributors) is that they receive credits, discounted merchandise, discounted versions, party invitations, and characters named after contributors and VIP perks.   
Threadless (Crowdsourcing type: crowdvoting)

Threadless.com is a web-based T-shirt company. The company uses crowdsourcing through designing process for their shirts by holding online competitions. The company is a classic case of crowd voting -- they hold votes on T-shirts' design for the crowd. The crowd submits their own ideas and designs to compete for a prize.
The main objective of Threadless was to take a risk by selling T-shirts to the youth crowd by having them say what they would want to buy, producing just those, and selling them all. One can say that the business model of this company is having a contest model with active voting and still focusing on crowd production of shirt designs. The company lets anyone design a T-shirt, and requires him or her to submit the design for weekly contests online. The crowd also rates their favorite designs and the winning design goes into production. The designers are rewarded with prizes and royalties.
Crowdsourcing has changed the way communities and the general crowd interact with companies. They are earnestly taking into consideration these external groups of diverse people to generate new ideas or solve problems. When organising a crowdsourcing call, companies spend time to target the right crowd and also spend resources for it. Experts and those who can make valuable contributions are not only found inside the company, which is carrying out a crowd-sourcing process, but also outside. This enables the company to have a wide pool of eager, creative and committed people ready to give inputs and make substantial contribution towards solving problems, generating ideas and innovating.
Crowdsourcing is not just another buzzword, not another meme. It is not just a repackaging of open-source philosophy for capitalist ends either. It is a model capable of aggregating talent, leveraging ingenuity while reducing the costs and time formerly needed to solve problems.
Finally, crowdsourcing is enabled through the technology of the web, which is a creative mode of user interactivity and input, not merely a medium for information and communication.  The relatively new concept of crowdsourcing has been evolving since Jeff Howe first conceptualized it in 2006. I look forward to the integration of this model of innovation in the marketplace and industry in Bangladesh.
.............................................
The author is a Lecturer in Management at the School of Business in Independent University, Bangladesh. He can be reached at:  parel.iftekhar@gmail.com