Can you imagine your clients designing your next hit product? Or paying a tenth of what it would cost with an agency to develop an excellent advertising campaign? These are just some of the advantages of co-creation. Have you realised that in today’s economic times, you no longer have the power to control your brand to your customers. Rather the success of your brand highly depends on how your customers or clients perceive it. This is now leading to being smart about the current marketing trends and taken advantage of the creative potential of your clients and engaging with them, after all the conversation and the debate about if your product is good or not is taking place on social media with or without your participation.
Below we have outlined a strategy which we find to be very inspiring on how to take advantage of this type of collaboration to work for you. This model was focused on by Mohanbir Sawhney (expert on marketing and innovation) during his opening speech at the World Marketing Forum Mexico in 2012.

Co-creation is a 360° process and involves the following dimensions of collaboration:
-Collaborative ideation: Do you know the platform My Starbucks Idea? There people sign up to share hundreds of ideas with Starbucks, from suggestions for a new type of coffee, to how to improve the customer experience in local stores. You can learn from Starbucks on how to create idea exchange with customers to improve your brand for same customers.
-Collaborative design: a clear example of product design provided by clients: the case of McDonalds. Maybe without even realizing it you enjoyed a delicious hamburger….whose ingredients were customized by its clients. If clients are involved in designing your product, they will have no other option but to buy your product. People like to feel accomplished at creating and owning ‘their’ products.
-Collaborative testing: In the era of social media, how can you legitimize NOT inquiring and receiving the opinion of clients about your products? Create a community and quickly you will have feedback about products. Discover if it works or not, in an instant! Instead of relying on the old traditional techniques.
-Collaborative advertising: Why pay hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising if you can have a professional, quality, effective campaign for…so much less? There are sites where advertising professionals offer their work as well as compete in order to offer you an excellent service for little money. Such sites include Odesk, Elance, etc.
-Collaborative support: There are support forums where clients support one another by reducing costs and satisfying their clients. The Cisco Support Forum is a good example of this. It is obviously important to closely monitor responses in order to ensure that the advice is accurate, as well as allow users to rate the quality of replies by users.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the term Co-creation doesn’t substitute for internal effort but rather complements it. It is necessary to develop co-creation muscles and the ability to exchange these ideas within the organisation. Is your startup, small business, company or organisation exercising your co-creation techniques to making your brand more poised at customer acceptance?