Give Your Brand to the People: Brand Crowdsourcing

Brands compete not only in the same arena but for the attention span of final consumers. According to the Meaningful Brands’ study by Havas, each consumer receives 6,000 advertising stimuli daily, but they only remember eight. This enormous gap can only change if we redefine how we establish brands in the minds of people, especially emerging and growing brands.

To do this, we must put our brands and their narrative in the hands of the people. We need to allow them to discover how they interact, feel, and interpret our communications; allow them to communicate in their own way, with all their personality and essence; allow them to have fun with your brand.

According to a recent study by Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) and Gretchen Rubin, 87 percent of people believe that brands can do more to bring happiness to their customers and 88 percent said they prefer brands that are fun. So, if you want to be remembered among those vast groups, you need to spice things up. And if your brand itself can’t, don’t limit the number of people who can do it.

The same study mentioned that 90 percent of people are more likely to remember ads that are funny. Sadly, companies said that only 12 percent of their ads in offline environments and 9 percent in online platforms actively use humor. So sad.

Open your eyes to what people are doing in a free environment like social media. They own all the content, the brands, the music, the movies ⁠— everything is theirs. Open your ears and hear what people are saying. Adapt and evolve. Go to forums, listen to podcasts, open your feedback to reviews, although, like everything else, reviews have to be just one part of a brand communication ecosystem. We can change based on the feedback, but it is still just feedback. We hear, listen, and even interact with consumers, but all of it gets reduced only to the people we reach or who know our brand.

If we open the communication to the people, we can discover how they feel about our brand, and how they collaborate with and reinterpret the products. The crowdsourcing method is one that can be applied to branding. To make this a credible and progressive scope of work, we need to set the rules, set the field, and give the ball to the people. Let them amplify what they understand, the advantages, and the faults as a part of the creative process.

Even if this represents a risk in terms of losing the narrative that is intended for the brand, especially with emerging brands, there are many benefits to amplifying, rediscovering new ways of communication, or even expanding into business areas that you haven’t thought were worth the gamble. To succeed, the key is segmentation, interaction, listening, and containment.

Like a football game, you set the field and the rules and let the players do their magic, but always within the environment that you promote. It’s not a goal if it is scored with the hand – with the exception of that one goal scored “by the hand of God,” of course. The time is now to break the rules and bet on change, to rethink how we can improve and how we can change the environment.

Co-marketing brands with final consumers, challenging content creators, and promotions come from experimentation. By giving your brand to the people, you can experience multiple experiments at the same time, accelerating the process of trial and error and in the end, grow faster in branding, users or sales.