In Real-Time Marketing & PR, David Meerham Scott discusses a concept that many of us are extremely familiar with: crowdsourcing. Many of us use it at least weekly in the form of Wikipedia, the ultimate crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In chapter nine, Scott discusses how crowdsourcing is used in television like American Idol or, in it's most common form, "to make decisions based on massively collective wisdom".
In June 2012, Lay's decided to take advantage of this concept by introducing the "Do Us A Flavor" competition. Through this competition, fans of Lay's Facebook page were able to create their own flavor of potato chips that would eventually make it to the final three. Nearly 3.8 million chip flavors were submitted and more than one million people voted on Facebook and Twitter. The winner of the competition was picked from three flavors: Garlic Cheesy Bread, Chicken & Waffles and Sriracha. Karen Weber-Mendham, a mother from Wisconsin, was the winner of the $1 million dollar prize and bragging rights to having the winning flavor.
Scott organized some steps for "Finding The Right Crowd", which includes soliciting suggestions from supporters for things such as new product names, encouraging people to vote on or rank a list of items or generating submissions to a contest-- all of which Lay's did. Lay's took a big leap of faith in how involved its target audiences would become in this high-stakes competition and experienced some amazing results.
Did you participate in the "Do Us A Flavor" competition? Did you try the flavors? I personally tried all three, Cheesy Garlic Bread was my favorite by far!
Although I didn't participate in the competition, I recently tried the Garlic Cheesy Bread chips lately. I have to say, they were extremely weird but really, really good! They tasted exactly like garlic cheesy bread, but it still crunched like a chip. My brain was slightly on overload. I do think it was an awesome campaign for Lay's to launch, though! Lay's was able to give the consumers a voice again, and let the audience know they were still listening.
ReplyDeleteI did not participate in the competition, but I did end up trying the Chicken & Waffles flavor because Jon bought it. I was not a fan of it; it was just plain weird, if you ask me. However, Jon thought it was delicious, so I guess it was a good choice for some people. I think this is a great contest that Lay's implemented and they would be smart to run the competition again to gain customers, feedback and interaction from existing customers. Great post!
ReplyDelete