Crowdsourcing Cases - Coca Cola - PepsiCo - Netflix - Amazon

Case 1 – Coca Cola

Although repeatedly used today, the operational models embedded in terms such as crowdsourcing and collaboration do not exactly constitute novelties in marketing: via surveys, for example, this activity has always sought to draw on the information derived from consumers of the Coca Cola Brazil brand. However, technologies have enabled this process to be carried out more openly and more transparently.

In Brazil, Coca Cola has bet on collaboration in projects such as Refresh Your Ideas, which 2018 received more than 250 thousand suggestions of art works to decorate the cans of the soft drink Sprite (subsequently, this contribution from the consumers also appeared on a sneaker chocolate bar , launched in partnership with the Redley brand). 

The crowdsourcing actions of Coca Cola have more to do with brand positioning and marketing. One of the most notable cases is that of the video collectively created in Singapore to launch Coca Cola Zero, an action that was later repeated globally.

Case 2 – PepsiCo

PepsiCo offers the biggest global portfolio of food and drink brands, which includes 22 different product lines that annually generate more than US$1 billion in sales each. Its main businesses – Quaker ? (cereal), Tropicana ? (fruit juice), Gatorade ? (sports drink), Frito-La Y ? (snacks), and Pepsi Cola ? (fizzy drink) – also produce hundreds of other tasty and nutritious convenience foods and drinks that are known and respected throughout the world.

Since 1953, PepsiCo has been one of the main food and drink companies in Brazil and operates in the market under preferred and market leading brands such as Quaker ? (cereal), Toddy ? and Toddynho ? (chocolate drinks), Elma Chips ?, Lucky ?, and Eqlibri ? (snacks), Mabel ? (cookies), Gatorade ? (sports drink), Lipton ? (ice tea, in partnership with Unilever), Kero Coco ? and Trop Coco ? (coconut water), and H2OH! ? and Pepsi Cola ? (fizzy drinks).

In total, the company has more than 19 plants and more than 100 sales branches located throughout Brazil and the counts on around 13 thousand employees, who have already chosen the company as one of the best workplaces in Brazil for 13 times. Since 1997, the company has maintained a close partnership with AmBev – the Americas Beverages Company – for the production, sales, and distribution of Pepsi ?, H2OH! ?, Gatorade ?, and Lipton ? to more than one million sales outlets throughout the country.

At PepsiCo, the employees are united by the commitment to achieve sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and the planet, which is also believed to be a more successful future for PepsiCo. At PepsiCo this is called commitment to Performance with Purpose; that is, PepsiCo promises to:

·      Offer a broad portfolio of food and drinks that attend the local tastes of the consumers;

·      Discover innovative ways of minimizing its impact on the environment, including the conservation of water and energy and a reduction in the volume of packaging;

·      Provide a great workplace for its employees; and to respect, support, and invest in the communities where it operates.

In the global setting, PepsiCo has already developed various actions based on crowdsourcing: among these, the Democracy campaign to choose new flavors for the Mountain Dew line of drinks sold in the United States, and the well-known broadcasting of a Doritos commercial created by a consumer during the highly-valued Super Bowl intervals. Little by little, this creates greater consumer loyalty and strengthens the brand’s performance indicators.

Since 2014 the PepsiCo brand also conducted an experiment with crowdsourcing. It made a bold proposal to its consumers: they were supposed to come up with new flavors of potato chips. This is an example of a crowdsourcing campaign. A task that is normally developed by an employee of the company itself is handed to the public in a free challenge format. This call from PepsiCo also proved to be quite fruitful. It is not by chance that since then other companies from the sector have sought to do something similar to this idea.

Case 3 – Netflix

For your business to succeed, much planning, research, and the creation of strategies that are consistent with your target public and operating area are needed. With Netflix it was no different. 

In 2006, the company promoted Netflix Prize, a competition that would give 1 million dollars to whoever was able to make at least a 10% improvement in the platform used. The initiative is known as crowdsourcing, in which different people work voluntarily and collaboratively in the same environment and project, seeking the same objective in this case, which besides the prize, involved the winner making improvements to the company’s already famous platform.

If you have already experienced Netflix, you know that you need to answer some questions about the type of content you prefer. Using this segmentation, the company is able to recommend what it judges to be of interest to you. This segmentation is also very important for you to develop your marketing strategies. Depending on the strategy of the sales funnel your possible client is in, the way you will approach the content available will be different. If the consumer is well fed over his/her trajectory, he/she will almost certainly be likely to buy when the time comes.

In 2013, in order to compete as equals with television companies that were consolidated in the market, such as HBO and Showtime, the company knew that losing the quality of what it was producing was not an option. Since then, various original productions have been launched, such as House of Cards, Narcos, Orange is the New Black, and even series made in partnership with Marvel, such as Daredevil and Jessica Jones, which have been highly praised and consumed.

Thus, one of the most relevant marketing lessons is to invest in content marketing in order to become a reference in your operating area. Create a blog, write articles that solve your potential clients’ problems, and by using your knowledge, educate them with regard to your products and services. With this strategy you convey credibility and professionalism and will also strengthen your ties with your public.

The social media team at Netflix does not miss an opportunity to create engagement. Aware that for many subscribers watching series is sacred, in “The ten commandments of Netflix”, actors from its main series presented 10 commandments for those who watch series. For this reason, it is not enough to merely create an account with some social networks. It is necessary to be active, interacting in a close and personalized way, even when someone is dissatisfied. At these times, you should find the best way of dealing with the situation in order to resolve your client’s problem.

When Netflix offers a free month trial, it is giving the consumer a chance to see if he/she really likes what is on offer. This test may be what was lacking for an indecisive consumer to close a contract and shows concern about the target public.

Case 4 –

According to the British consultancy Interbrand (2016), the Amazon brand alone is valued at US$18,625 billion, occupying position number 20 in the ranking of the most valuable brands in the world, besides occupying position number 15 in the ranking of the most influential brands in the world. The company also occupied position number 56 in the ranking of FORTUNE 500 magazine (companies with the highest turnover in the American market) in 2013.

The company, which is the biggest online retailer in the world, sells more than 22 million different products to 179 countries and has more than 62 million customers, a turnover of more than US$48 billion, and more than 31 distribution centers throughout the world, totaling more than 840,000m2 of warehouse space. Moreover, it has six international web pages: besides amazon.com in the United States, there are local websites in England, Germany, Japan, France, Canada, China, Spain, and Italy. Amazon is the 10th most visited website on the Internet, with more that 62% accesses made in the United States. North America alone was responsible for 54.6% of its sales in 2010. The period with the highest volume is the month of December, when the company dispatches approximately 3.4 million orders daily to 200 countries.

Amazon is still the owner of various other businesses such as A9.com, which develops the electronic commerce and advertising search engine; Internet Movie Database (also known by the abbreviation IMDb), an online database of information on music stars, cinema, movies, programs, television programs, and commercials; and Alexa Internet, a service that measures how many users visit a website and other related statistics.

Like Netflix, Amazon will produce its own content to complement its on-demand sales catalogue. It already has 21 movie projects and 9 own series in development. Since the end of 2010, the company Amazon Studios has received thousands of scripts on its website, sent by aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers. If one becomes a TV series, the author will receive more than US$55 thousand, or in the case of a feature-length film, US$200 thousand. Warner Bros is a partner of Amazon for the production of feature-length films whose first screening will be in the cinemas.

Instead of buying a script and then investing in the production of a feature-length film or the pilot of a series, Amazon first invests in the development of the script and in the production of test videos, which are evaluated by thousands of volunteers. The authors receive comments in order to adjust their scripts in the hope that they will be become movies and series.

For whoever knows Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s online crowdsourcing market, the Amazon Studios will sound familiar. For example, Amazon put its best new test movies from 2011 on Amazon Instant Video, its video streaming service. The customers saw the projects thousands of times, according to the company. Now the company is using the opinions and comments left to rewrite the scripts.

Amazon has also gathered data on how many times customers watched the test videos and how many watched the videos in full. This form of implicit feedback is just as useful, or sometimes more useful, than explicit feedback, revealing a lot about the possible commercialization of these ideas.

Amazon Studios recently made "Blackburn Burrow", the film script from the screenwriter Jay Levy, into a digital comic story, in order to obtain more information from consumers. HQ, available from the Kindle store, has become Amazon’s most downloaded free comic and comes with a survey of opinion about what people think of the story, according to Levy.

Obviously, market research in creative processes is nothing new. Hollywood tests movies using focus groups all the time, but not on such a large and open scale as the Amazon. There is often no public feedback almost until the movie is launched and the production of movies is an interactive process, draft after draft. Amazon is doing well to find more places over the course of the process to obtain feedback.

Understanding that marketing is characterized by intangible capital and that it can, therefore, interfere directly with the company's revenue, it is fundamental to know new strategies that can be increased to this capital, in order to boost the revenue of the business and increase its competitive value. In this sense, understanding the development of crowdsourcing is of paramount importance. With the presentation of illustrative cases it is possible to unveil emerging concepts that are associated with crowdsourcing, the reputational capital of organizations, the development of web 2.0, and the network society.

Still reflecting on the findings of this study, it is possible to observe that the marketing needs to be rethought and very well designed so that it is viable for organizations to ensure the maintenance of their brand reputation in a context that demands increasingly more transparency and less information asymmetry.

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