Co-creation refers to the involvement of consumers in product innovation and development. It involves bringing end-users together to develop a product that caters to their own needs. Co-creation is a marketing approach to increase consumer engagement with the brand. It also allows you to build healthy relations and provide a better user experience. With the increasing focus on consumer-oriented marketing, the value generated by customer co-creation is at its peak. Having a say in production and company innovation brings a sense of belongingness to the consumers. This generates consumer loyalty and engagement. The insights gained through such initiatives provide companies with the data to work on their products. This consumer-focused method of production increases the success rate of innovations. Since you are addressing consumer needs from the start of the development process.
Ways to Achieve Successful Consumer Co-creation
There are multiple strategies developed to involve consumers in the marketing and production processes. Each technique offers a distinctive advantage. And we can use them in combination with one another. We discuss here the most popular ones.
1. Workshops:
You can organize workshops and brainstorming sessions either online or in-house. This encourages consumers to provide ideas for product innovation and development. The major advantage of workshops is that the pace of idea generation is faster. Plus, it is easy to provide guidelines and an encouraging environment to stimulate engagement.
2. Crowdsourcing:
As the name suggests, crowdsourcing is a combination of ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. It involves getting people to take part in problem-solving, product innovation, design, and development. Crowdsourcing requires providing an engaging environment with many consumers and/or developers to generate ideas on a large scale. It enables interaction with a large group of consumers. Crowdsourcing also helps generate good brand awareness. But it is challenging to provide such a platform while ensuring open space for innovation.
Threadless and My star bucks Idea are perfect examples of successful crowd-sourcing campaigns.
3. Open-Source:
Open-source means enabling developers and consumers to develop the product according to their own specific needs. This is very popular in IT products like Linux, Odoo, Python, Firefox, etc. The open-source model allows users to access the source files of the package. And it allows them to make customizations as per their requirements. High-end developers also suggest improvements in the current software, which helps in upgrading the product.
4. Mass Customization:
This enables a group of users to get a customized product to meet their niche demands. It involves catering to the needs of a small set of consumer groups. You achieve this by providing customized products for their needs. We earn profit by asking them for a premium price for the product and by mass production for the target consumer group. Personalized apparel designs and shoes are very common examples of mass customization. We can break down mass customization into several levels depending upon the suitability. Read more: Mass customization implementation and types
5. User-generated Content:
You can define it as "any form of content such as blogs, discussion forums, posts, tweets, podcasts, wikis, chats, digital images, audio files, video, advertisements and other forms of media that were created by users of an online system or service, often made available via social media websites".
This type of content provides a tremendous surge of ideas and solutions. And it also provides a high level of customer engagement. But it gets tricky to choose winners from the lot. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Slide share are popular examples of user-generated content.