Creative crowdsourcing to get extra spark of ideas
For The Arnott’s Group, Australia’s largest biscuit producer, working with InSites’ eÿeka network of creative consumers has been our first creative crowdsourcing experience. The biggest driver to trying this new approach was our observation that ideation with everyday consumers does not always give the desired results. Similar for internal ideation efforts – we were coming up with the same ideas over and over again. This is no surprise, as we are all consumers influenced by what we see in the supermarket, and marketers reading the same trend reports. The team needed an extra spark of fresh ideas to excite our consumers, and eÿeka did exactly that. They inspired our thinking with new elements we hadn’t considered before.
We asked the eÿeka members to come up with new and exciting flavors for Shapes, a savory biscuit cracker range. It was fascinating to see how an international crowd of creative people interpreted the Australian market and came up with ideas. For example, a few ideas were based around native ingredients. They also took a different perspective. We might have fixed ideas on how broad a product range is, but creative consumers do not have this frame of reference, easily thinking outside the box, to identify new opportunities. While not an objective of this project, some of the eÿeka ideas also inspired our social media content. There was an idea around a ‘love or hate’ range – of polarizing flavors like coriander – which we posted as a conversation starter on our channels, and it generated great responses, definitely creating some buzz.
The true value of creative crowdsourcing is not only in the fresh ideas, but also in the work with the InSites Consulting team afterwards, going from a long list of ideas to curated output. By merging and building on the initial ideas, you really come to something completely new. I’m confident we will tap into the creativity of the crowd more in the future, not only for product development, but also for brand communication and activation.