Idea Spark: Social Marketing Use Case #7—Product Development & Innovation

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

The seventh use case in our series is Product Development & Innovation. In our prior discussions, we talked about how social media opens the door not just for “media impressions” (aka Building Brand Awareness) but direct engagement with consumers. In this discussion, we talked about one of the advantages of this direct engagement—the ability for brands to generate new product and enhancement ideas from their customers. Listening to customer feedback AND engaging consumers to provide ideas and input to future product features and offerings—even crowdsourcing to develop or vote upon new product ideas—enables consumers to participate in the product launch process and enables brands to get early feedback and develop early advocacy from these engaged consumers. Here are the ideas sparked from the discussion.

1. Consumer beverage example.
• Through their product monitoring, they took a look at the brand mentions of the consumer beverage brand and the keywords that people used to describe their product experience. The keyword that kept coming up was “Protein.”
• They stuck the word “Protein” on the label and sales went up.
• Listening to consumer chatter to learn what consumers perceived was the value of the product helped the brand to tap into a new market need. What happened here wasn’t a product innovation per se, but a marketing shift to meet the perceived market need. The MARKET identified the value proposition, and the marketer tapped into that value prop through monitoring social media.
2. Avoiding the “marketing effect.”
• Companies have historically turned to focus groups and surveys to get product ideas and feedback. However, being a part of a focus group or a survey has a conscious or unconscious impact on a subject’s answers and opinions. Controlled studies can provide valuable insight, but the “marketing effect” of these controlled environments may skew the results in a way that could skew the results favorably/unfavorably from true consumer opinion. In addition, people often self-select for focus groups; they WANT to provide strong opinions, and those opinions may not be representative of the general population.
• Social media allows brands to “listen” to the “true utterances” of consumers, unguided by their own questions or biases. By monitoring social channels, brands can see consumer’s spontaneous or unguided opinions and experiences about their products.
• However, are social consumers representative of the customer base as a whole? Does a company make a decision based upon just the social voices? Is the social consumer a target SEGMENT or representative of the customer base? How does the demographic of the target customer map to the demographic of the social consumer? Do they intersect? If you’re using social media to drive product innovation, does that feedback represent the entire buying public? These questions need serious discussion and evaluation to determine the fit between social feedback and overall market evaluation.
3. How are brands using social media for product development?
• Not many companies are doing it. We’re still in the early stages of this kind of brand monitoring and the integration of those results into product research.
• Gatorade’s Social Media “Mission Control” and Dell’s IdeaStorm are exceptions.
4. Product Development Use Cases.
• Listening for Feedback.Listening for feedback is the first step. Start listening for what people are talking about, how people are using our product, how they perceive the value of the product, what messages and keywords are buzzing (e.g. “Protein” in conjunction with a beverage).
• Marketing Messaging.Shift product messaging to match consumer preferences, discussions and use cases.
• Crowdsourcing.Get people to drive the design and specifics of a new product. Or even pre-pay for a new product based upon crowdsourced designs. Utilize crowdsourcing to vote for a favorite (e.g. Mountain Dew flavors).
5. What kind of consumer companies can benefit from these use cases?
• Airlines.Southwest was not charging for passenger luggage when the trend from the other major airlines was to begin charging for bags. “Bags Fly Free” shifted their marketing message (rather than policy) and turned into a huge consumer value proposition.
• Dominos/Food Service.Took consumer comments (e.g. “tastes like cardboard) and created an ad campaign to combat those misconceptions. Additionally, Dominos used a potentially damaging PR incident and launched their social campaigns to combat the potential PR headache. Their public transparency helped save the brand’s image.
• Everyone.Individual consumers have a voice today. One conversation can drive a brand’s message, and a brand can take a potentially damaging, negative comment and turn it into something hugely positive. (e.g. Wheat Thins “Crunch is Calling” takes tweets and drops a huge load of product in front of the consumer who tweeted)
6. How does the “social innovation” process happen in a company? How do companies develop the right processes to handle this innovation?
• Someone (usually a stake holder) within a company needs to see the value of this kind of new media “experiment” and prove its value.
• A company’s internal culture and processes have a deep impact on whether social innovation can occur within a company. Is the company receptive to new ideas? How do they process and internalize product feedback? Do they continually try to drive innovation?
• Lots of companies believe that social marketing = having a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page. There’s SO much more to it.
• Ease of implementation has a significant impact on social innovation. Southwest’s “Bags Fly Free” was a marketing campaign. It required no business process change. Mountain Dew’s flavor crowdsourcing was a huge campaign that impacted packaging, bottling, shelf space, media, etc. However, innovation can also come from within (Subway Five Dollar Footlong came from a single store).

 
As you can see, lots of great ideas and thoughts come out during our Creativity Coffee sessions. Won’t you join us in the discussion?
 
Photo Credit: 123dan321