There are numerous examples of companies using social media for product development, like Mountain Dew's most recent campaign. Through the website DEWmocracy 2,9million people voted for their top three out of seven new flavors. These flavors were chosen by Mountain Dew out of a number of user generated flavors, outsourcing several steps in the product development process to it's customers. This process of outsourcing market research and product development to your customers while getting extensive marketing in the bargain appears to be a genius solution. One issue of concern is if the customers voting for a different flavor than the winner will be alienated. Time will tell if this has been a successful campaign when the flavor will be launched in October 2010.
A model for product development, the customer to customer(CTC) model, was presented in an article by Ucler and Vayvay from 2008 (se the picture below). The white circle represents activities handled by the company, the green box is the external influence; the customer. Focusing on what the customers value is not a novel idea, but nonetheless a good one. This figure is not ideal for evaluating the Mountain Dew model. This arises the question whether a new model for product development is needed when dealing with social media, or is just a new way of doing requirement management?
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| The CTC model |
A norwegian example: http://www.litago.no/kuenebestemmer/
ReplyDeleteNorwegian dairy company TINE's new web campaign lets you follow 10 actual cows in real time. The field on which they graze has been divided into zones. each zones has an assigned milk flavor, and the zone most popular among the cows determins the next milk flavor from Tine. Everyday you can vote to place an event in a zone. I have voted to dump a large amount of bananas in the blueberry zone on thuesday, to lure the cows to that zone. I also voted to have an actual high school marching band on spearmint on friday, to scare the cows away. It is so silly I am completely fascinated.