Media World Sunday, March 14, 2010 By Catherine O'Mahony Crowd-sourcing is in vogue these days, with manufacturers asking the public to contribute ideas to their brand.
Campaigns such as O2’s Be the Difference doffs a cap in this trendy direction (see accompanying story),since it’s partly seeking content from rugby fans. Cadbury recently completed a well received online campaign for a member of the public to develop a new design for its Dairy Milk wrapper.
Both are clever, as they tap into a particular enthusiasm.
I’m not sure if the concept works so well on a larger scale. The cosmetics brand Clarins has been generating a stir in the marketing world globally, with its online campaign that asks customers to come up with a new product.
Clarins has developed a website called ‘Womanity’, an online media platform that’s ‘‘associated’’ with the Thierry Mugler perfume brand, but which is designed to generate ideas for products from the community rather than push the original brand.
It’s all very grand in scale. Microsoft’s MSN is in charge of editorial strategy. Versions of the site will launch in different languages,including Spanish,German,Italian, Portuguese and French. I still doubt whether it will catch on.
If you log onto Womanity, what greets you is too tedious for anyone but the most extreme Thierry Mugler fanatic to bother with.
Here’s the sort of contribution you find, if you’ve been patient enough to wait the frustrating interval required for the complicated thing to upload: ‘‘Womanity is the quality of being a woman.
We differentiate ourselves from the rest of huMANity in biological, social, cultural and spiritual terms. Biologically, we are homa sapiens, bipedal primates in stilettos, slippers, sneakers and a thousand other pairs.”
Will anyone find this compelling, in any language?
A further idea is that visitors to the site choose colours and use a ‘mood bar’ that alters the Womanity logo according to community consensus.
The aspiration is to enrol two million Womanity members in nine months.
‘‘The brand is ready to become whatever the users want’’ was last week’s quote from Ferdinando Verderi, creative director at WPP-backed New York agency Johannes Leonardo, which is working on the project.
Presumably, there has been extensive consumer research prior to launch.
But this Clarins user would like the brand to produce lovely perfumes and make-up, rather than suck up valuable web surfing time with pointless content.
|
Text-Only