EBlog
What do Mountain Dew, crowdsourcing, and social media have in common?
November 15, 2007 | Posted by: Lee
Following up on Nicholas' post from earlier today, check out what Mountain Dew's got going. They've created DEWmocracy.com with the purpose of getting customers to create their next Dew drink - "The People's Dew" as they call it. They're using crowdsourcing to create their next product. We're talking picking the flavor, design the logo, label, and tagline.
Not only are they building a new product, they'll have a ready-made audience ready to consume it, and they're collecting personal information for visitors to the site in the process. Brilliant.
There's a movie on their site and others on YouTube, message boards for participants, they've even got traction on the BEVNET "your source for beverage news & reviews" blog, there are some Facebook groups and Flickr pages popping up. Heck the movie from the site is already on IMBD.
So, will this work? Will Mountain Dew be able to get enough people involved to make it worthwhile? Stay tuned.
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Comments
November 15 2007 - 05:24 PM | by Nicholas
Kettle Foods has been letting customers suggest and choose new flavors for their Kettle Chips brand for awhile. In this way they’ve created community around their brand.
They also actively support social and environmental causes, which places them in another very loyal and vocal community. I think we’d call that “widening their circle of influence.”
November 15 2007 - 05:51 PM | by Nicholas
BTW, my answer to your question is, “No.” Or maybe, “I hope not.” That Dewmocracy site, while certainly fancy, misses the mark. Here are the thoughts that went throw my head while I was at the site:
- What’s with this movie? Is it a trailer that I have to sit through to find out how to vote? Oh, this is an ad about the site I’m on. Ok...? How the hell do I choose the new flavor? That’s what I came here to do!
- Oh, I see the “Help Create the new flavor...” text. Click the learn more, but get to an FAQ page which contains an obvious link to “Watch the Movie” but no link to anything about voting or choosing the new flavor. Click back, and cringe because I know I’ll have to deal with pressing stop on the movie.
- I now click the “Dewmocracy” link, but think a couple things. 1) why is the link text “Dewmocracy”? Aren’t I already on that site? Poorly chosen link text, if you ask me. 2) Why do I have to “Join Dewmocracy” to choose the new flavor? I’m already doing you a favor by telling you what I think about your future product, don’t force me to give you information about myself to do so. Get me straight to the fun stuff, then ask me for my info (if then.)
- I then get to the actual form. The text reads: “To get exclusive access to Dew and DEWmocracy news, sweepstakes and more, you need to register.” What?! I don’t want to get news about Mountain Dew! Who cares? I just want to play around and choose the next flavor. And why do you need my birthday? Is this an alcoholic drink? Are they going to send me a birthday present?
In the end, it’s obvious to me as a consumer that they care more about getting my info in order to spam me and making some flashy site than actually getting my input on their next product. And that’s good for them, since I didn’t even come close to participating, obviously.
All in all, the experience was extremely poor. I understand their effort, and I love that they are trying new things and using Flickr and the like, but they seriously dropped the ball on this site.