How Do You Engage Customers to Co-Create?
by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Last month, Doritos decided to fuel America’s growing appetite for homemade videos by inviting consumers to create a 30-second commercial to sell Doritos. Online consumer voting in January 2007 will pick the winners. Five finalists will get $10,000 each.

The Grand Prize winner’s commercial will be aired during the 2007 Super Bowl XLI.

Doritos’ move is part of a new trend called co-creation. Information technology has empowered consumers to share ideas, documents, images, and movies across the forever- expanding digital world. The Internet allows businesses to engage customers in a creative workshop experience. Here is a recent example.

Starwood has recently opened a brand-new hotel called Aloft Hotel that exists only online. The virtual hotel, located in the virtual world called Second Life, invites guests to tour the hotel, walk around the lobby, check into a room, send an avatar swimming in the pool, and watch a sunset on the rooftop terrace. Visitors are asked to comment on the design, and the feedback is shared with the architects and design team. The company co-creates new hotel features with potential customers while marketing the new brand long before the first Aloft Hotel opens in 2008.

More and more companies are waking up to the fact that, around the globe, there are thousands of creative minds with fresh ideas waiting to be expressed. For example, to celebrate its 150th anniversary, Timex conducted a global design competition: Timex2154: The Future of Time. Designers from 72 countries explored the future of personal and portable timekeeping and sent in 640 surprisingly creative entries. In the past, customers have been limited to communicating their wants and needs in surveys and focus groups; today, brands deploy existing technologies to map their customer’s imagination. Brands no longer view consumers as targets with a wallet, but as co-creators of exciting and profitable solutions.

The trend of co-creation marks the end of the “Father knows best” philosophy practiced by old-fashioned manufacturers. Today’s customers want to be personally courted and digitally engaged. They want to have a direct say in what gets produced. This means letting go of central control and asking the brightest minds across the globe to be your advisors. Frans Johansson, author of the book The Medici Effect, states it succinctly, saying “diversity drives innovation.”

The trend of co-creation is not limited to advertising, marketing, or manufacturing. It also applies to selling. In the past, marketing wrote the music and all salespeople played from the same sheet. Successful salespeople have long realized that their customers don’t pay attention to the old song-and-dance routine. Good selling is not like a symphony, but more like jazz. Good salespeople listen to a riff from their customer, and then respond with a riff of their own. They co-create the sale with the customer. Today’s tough competition demands that we engage our present and future customers in a process of co-creation before they take their ideas and dollars elsewhere.

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