Online Concept Test – Customer Crowd
"There is only one boss. The customer."Sam Walton
EXPLOIT
Sam Walton
Sam Walton
Role of this tool
A Customer Crowd can be used to evaluate the appeal of an innovation. The principles and design of such a crowd are outlined in the Crowdsourcing Platform tool. But in the Customer Crowd people are asked to rate and respond to new products that are mocked up in a realistic way.
How do we use it?
Create content by turning our ideas into consumer propositions that are as complete as possible. For example we can include prices, packaging usage suggestions or distribution channels.
Design key elements of the Customer Crowd such as setting the timescale, deciding on prizes and enabling voting. Use Challenge Designer at this stage.
How will we select the winners of our challenge?
Voting is a key part of what makes crowdsourcing platforms work. Will we enable the community to vote on ideas and if so how many will we progress? We can configure the platform to enable customers to vote on any aspect of the new product as well as its general appeal (See PPP Filter for a suggestion of selection criteria).
What is our recruitment plan?
This is a key part of the process and much will depend on how successful we are at recruiting a crowd that knows about our subject and is representative of our target audience. See Challenge Designer for a number of ways to recruit consumer-based panels.
If we have already recruited for Insight Crowd or Crowdsourcing Platform it can be a great idea to use the same people for evaluation. They have seen the genesis of the products and will have a high level of engagement with the process. This approach will also save us time and money.
What is the crowd process?
How long will it need? If we haven’t got a crowd already it will take a month to design and deploy the platform and then a month for people to discover it and learn how to use it. Customer Crowds are of shorter duration that other types as there is generally less to do for members.
How will we incentivise people to take part?
Many crowdsourcing platforms are gamified in that they have leaderboards and points awarded for various activities for submitting ideas or commenting and voting on the ideas of others. How many points will we award for evaluating a product in detail versus voting or suggesting improvements? Will we give prizes for the most activity?
How will we feed the results back to our crowd?
After the challenge it is important to feed back to the community what happens as a result. If we don’t, next time it will be hard to engage the audience. How will we do this and when?
Source: 100%Open
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