Question

Resource: Impact of Online Crowdsourcing on Marketing Strategy Grading Guide Evaluate an online crowdsourcing site. Examples include, Dell's Idea storm, and Starbucks. Write a paper in which you review a crowdsourcing site. Marketing has evolved in its relationship to customers. Marketing to consumers has shifted to marketing for consumers. Marketing for consumers has the power to choose whether they want to create a dialogue. • How has the organization leading the crowdsourcing utilized consumers to help build its organization? • How does this option of crowdsourcing influence marketing strategy? • What is the impact of mobile and social media campaigns on marketing strategy for this organization?

Answer 1

Crowd sourcing is the practice of engaging a crowd or a group for a common goal, often for innovation, problem solving or efficiency. It is getting work or funding usually online from a crowd of people, the idea being to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers. It begins with worker training and testing where workers are trained and tested before working begins. Then the qualified workers then view tasks for which they have achieved qualification, and each task has efficient user interface that increases throughput and maintain quality. After the worker completes the task, the next process of smart quality control involves work flowing to trusted reviewers who ensures it meets your quality goals. The final process is performance-based promotions incentivize quality work. Jeff Howe (2006a) describes crowdsourcing as a decision to outsource a certain tasks or problem to a large heterogeneous public-the crowd- in form of an open call.

One of the common and largest crowdsourcing sites is Kickstarter, a vibrant community of people working together to bring new things to life. Friends, fans and sponsored strangers have pledge $3.2 billion to project on Kickstarter, funding everything from homemade cards to Oscar-winning documentaries. The site is a tool for artists that allows anyone to create a project in a variety of categories including art, comics, crafts, dance, design, fashion, film and video, food, games, journalism, music, photography, publishing, technology and theatre with $85 million pledged to art and 10,872 successfully funded art projects.

The organization taken advantage of its vast consumer base to grow, for instance, millions of backers agree helping to create something new and exciting. The site allows users to choose a funding goal and a set number of days to reach the goal,   thus users have enough funds to realize their projects and gives backers incentive to pledge more to help reach desired goals. The Kickstarter community has over 12.5 million people to have pledge more than $2.88 billion to bring Kickstarter projects to life over the years. Kickstarter has been growing everyday as new creators join to better the platform such as creation of creator handbook, tips blog and campus Q&A space and Kickstarter Live for connecting with your community through live video.

Crowdsourcing has played a vital role as far as marketing is concerned. Crowdsourcing campaigns can be used to outsource a marketing activity, normally performed by the company itself or by its suppliers to the crowd and can generate value for almost al marketing related activities including product development, promotion and advertising or marketing research (Gatautis & Vitauskaite, 2014). For instance, in product development, the task of the crowdsourcing project might be to design a new product which accomplishes a certain purpose. Djelassi & Decoopman (2013) and Whitla, (2009) contend that crowdsourcing can further be a substitute for advertising agencies when the crowd is asked to come up with an idea form commercial purpose and produce it themselves, and its especially useful for marketing and market research including studying participant’s behavior.

Social media has also been instrumental in crowdsourcing sites. (Füller et al., 2013; Kozinets, Hemetsberger & Schau, 2008; Lakhani, 2013) articulates that technological developments in the last decade fostered participatory tools and platforms, the expansion of social media made the use of creative and collaborative tools fast and easy. Proliferation of social media sites such as facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube, together with mobile technologies enables companies to engage with a large group of customers at the same time and without geographic restrictions Prpic, Shuklar, Kietzmann & McCarthy, (2015). Social media also enabled companies to be able to access and harness knowledge and ideas of an almost immeasureable amount of people (Brabham 2008, 2011), and this development laid a foundation for the concept of crowdsourcing which largely dependent on the interactive web.

For Kickstarter in particular, mobile gadgets and social media has been critical to its growth and marketing campigns. Mobile gadgets for instance is available to millions of people who use them to access popular social media sites like facebook, twitter, instagram among others and are able to get information about funding, marketing videos, and notifications about products and services offered or they can offer. This facilitates interested parties to sign up and start working on projects, thus enables the company to grow tremendously. Apart from that, the ones working on the projects or services get rewarded for their quality work, and those with talent are also able to find jobs in the company to further advance their skills.

References:

Prpic, J.; Shukla, P.; Kietzmann, J.; & McCarthy, I. (2015). How to Work a Crowd: Developing Crowd Capital through Crowdsourcing, Business Horizons, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 77-8

Brabham, D. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 75-90

Brabham, D. (2011). Crowdsourcing: A Model for Leveraging Online Communities (draft), forthcoming in: The Rutledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures.

Howe, Jeff (2006a). Crowdsourcing: A Definition, Blog,

Füller, J., Bilgram, V.; Koch, G. & Rapp, M. (2013). The Potential of Crowdsourcing for Co-Marketing: How Consumers May Be Turned into Brand Ambassadors, Transfer Werbeforschung & Praxis, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 42-48

Djelassi, S. & Decoopman, I. (2013). Customers’ Participation in Product Development through Crowdsourcing: Issues and Implications, Industrial Marketing Management, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 683-692

Whitla, P. (2009). Crowdsourcing and Its Application in Marketing Activities, Contemporary Management Research, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 15-28

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