The Idea of Crowdsourcing and Its Implementation in Business

In present days, average American people spend more than 24 hours on the internet. In this time, people often chatting with their friends, relatives or buying something from the uses of market-place. The trending of spending time with the internet can be beneficial for radical, innovative and sophisticated companies if they use this spare time on benefit for both users or companies. As per the Mariam Webster crowdsourcing, defined only in 2006, is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services, including ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. In another word, crowdsourcing is the process to obtain the information or idea with help of the internet, from the random person, that can be used in the organization for their research, innovation or creation.

The article is written very clearly, and depicts the main objective and finding clearly to the reader. The author reviewed stuffiest literature and case study to finalize the paper. The article illustrates the method of how a growing company can use crowdsource as a relationship-building tool with the consumer. The methods of the studies are case studies of several multinational and national companies and literature review. The article has presented the case study of Pepsi, Dell, Starbucks, Lego Mindstorms and BZ WBK bank in Poland on how these company growing their business and solving the organizational problem with using of the public or potential consumer of the company. These companies opted the unique model of crowdsourcing as receiving feedback model so that the company can grow and defeat to the competitor. It can be shown that many cases studied company has received positive and negative feedback, which they applied in their organization and grew their business.

The main aspect of the article is it depicts that crowdsourcing connects the motivation of two sides, company motivation and consumer motivation as both of them want something by communication with each other. It is presented that the motivations of the company would be earning trust and commitment of the consumers, spurring innovation, decreasing the cost, better understanding of the need of the consumer and the feeling of involvement of the consumer in designing of the new brand. While, consumers motivations are sharpening of the new skills and traits, helping and inspiring others or doing something that matters, gaining recognition and so on. Further, in between of these two sides, company gives an authenticity in consumers’ eye, better understanding of consumers’ demand, interacting with the consumer, gaining loyalty and commitment of the customer and creating the community around the brand, where both sides of the expectations can be benefitted and can build the relationship between them.

Summary of the Research

This article aims at introducing the idea of crowdsourcing and describing how businesses can use it in marketing and for building and maintaining strong positive relationships with their potential and current customers. It presents several case studies of its successful implementation by companies both in Poland and worldwide. Furthermore, the article describes possible benefits and pitfalls that businesses, which decide to introduce crowdsourcing, can face as well as motivations of people who decide to spend their free time and effort to engage in this kind of activities. 

References

• Chwiałkowska, A. (2012). CROWDSOURCING AS A CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP BUILDING TOOL . Journal of Positive Management, 1.
• Condliffe, J. (2018, 0123). MIT technology Review. Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/f/610045/the-average-american-spends-24-hours-a-week-online/
• Webster, M. (2019, 10 29). Marriam Webster since 1828. Retrieved from Marriam Webster since 1828: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crowdsourcing#h1
• Wikipedia. (2019, 10 29). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing