What is Crowdsourcing in Market Research? 

Crowdsourcing involves inviting a large group of people to help solve a problem or create an idea. Typically, crowdsourcing occurs via online communities, and shares similarities with co-creation. By inviting a large group of thinkers to contribute ideas and solutions in response to a defined problem, brands and marketers can use crowdsourcing to discover unexpected ideas and solutions.   

How do you Crowdsource in Market Research? 

Once you have your community filled with the right crowed, you can consider the following ideas for crowdsourcing: 

• Idea competitions: invite customers and users to compete against each other by contributing proposals for new products, services, or solutions. This will require good incentives and a competition permit. 
• Voting and building ideas: basically co creation online with a larger scale crowd.  The focus has to be on the idea builds, not to run lots of other research alongside 
• Online reviews:  Analysis of online reviews using text analytics can be conducted for you. This is a form of social listening.  

Crowdsourcing considerations 

Crowdsourcing ideas and solutions offer some amazing benefits for companies but there are pros and cons.  

• Faster idea generation: with a larger pool of people to contribute their knowledge and ideas, businesses can find solutions and solve problems at a much greater speed.   
• Wider pool of expertise allows companies to access a wider pool of talent, experience, and expertise in solving problems. This means companies can break out of their traditional status quo thinking and find innovative ways of doing things.  
• Less management burden: more hands off, leave it to the experts 
• Unexpected ideas: people come up with great ideas.  They may be simple or wild, but it is up to you to do something with it, and it gets your team out of the lofty tower of thinking that traps innovation dead. 

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

If you have questions about using a market research online community for your company, or if you have general questions about market research online communities and how they can help your company deliver more value to your customers, drop us a line at info@rubychacha.com.au , visit our website at www.rubychacha.com.au or call us on 80946800.