I attended the CIO Forum Asia 2009 at the Grand Hyatt, Singapore, today. The recurring messages from the presenters were about emerging trends such as increasingly high adoption of mobility / mobile computing platform, increasingly high adoption of Internet computing, social networking/community, distributed co-creation, mashups, use of technologies to drive down costs (e.g. unified communications, collaboration, virtualization, optimized IT management, etc.), and use of CRM and Business Intelligence to drive profitability and provide better business insights. Nothing new.
But one interesting concept was of particular interest to me. That is prosumerism. Edward Tan (c/o McKinsey) have explained this as a way or process to empower your customers to get them involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they used. Hence, the term prosumer = producer + consumer.
Here are two examples of how organizations have leveraged on their customers to increase brand awareness, loyalty, as well as to build upon their product or service offering:
- Pepsi launched a creative competition in China, inviting the public to
submit their most innovative and creative video promoting Pepsi cola drink. It drew an overwhelming response from the public. All in all, 28000 scripts were received, 690000 bulletin postings and when it came to the online voting, the competition received 5 million votes. Did Pepsi spent million of dollars engaging a professional advertisement firm to devise their new ad? No. They spent negligible amount of fund to engage their customers, and the end result are extreme publicity and brand awareness. - TomTom is a digital mapping and routing company that focuses on car navigation. One of their products is Portable Navigation Devices (PNDs). Nowadays, there are so
many brands and models of such devices out in the market. So, how did TomTom differentiate themselves? Easy, they leverage on the data from more than 7 million users to create what they termed as Map Share Technology, IQ Routes technology, etc. By using real-time data from active users, they can effectively provide the fastest route and most accurate traffic information to their users. i.e. in other words the customers contribute in innovating and improving the product / service offering.
So, why do I think prosumerism is fascinating and interesting?
This is because of the changing demographic of our population, the changing behavior of our younger generation, or Generation-Y or “millennials” as what they termed it. As the baby-boomers aged, the population demographic changes. Millennial cohort outnumbered the boomers and this cohort are those whom are using more of mobile computing platforms, always online, collaborating, creating more contents, sharing these contents, and interacting with each other. Engaging this generation creatively and innovatively can be a path to your future growth and profitability.
Tags: Emerging trends, Prosumerism