When I wrote my first paper in 2009 about co-creation, I had already the feeling that it would quickly become a big thing, one of those topics that can capture the attention of the business world. The readers of this blog have been given the opportunity to follow the evolution of the co-creation concept and how it penetrated the business world.

Although academics still debate over the ver definition of the co-creation concept (Vargo and Lusch didn’t define it precisely in 2004) it can already be noticed that co-creation is becoming increasingly popular in the business world. Not knowing exactly what it means, practitioners create their own definitions and use co-creation as a synonym for other some trendy marketing practices. The latest example of this was given to me by a short article published on the website of a leading magazine fr marketing practitioners. The author used co-creations as a synonym for dialog and innovation with online communities. Surely enough co-creation encompasses aspects of innovation through customers’ and other stakeholders’ involvement. However this online dialog, presented as a must for today’s firms, can hardly help reach breakthrough innovation and can be expected to deliver incremental innovation at best. Just think about the type of ideas implemented by successful platforms like MyStarbucksIdea and DellIdeaStorm.

My take:

Of course this is only my opinion but this co-creation concept doesn’t inspire me any longer. It is not a revolution anymore. It is becoming a trend and I don’t like trends followed by the mass.

Look at American Airlines for instance. They really brought out a revolution with their miles-based loyalty card. They set up a standard that has been followed by all other airlines. Once a loyalty instrument, it is no longer what it aimed at.

Co-creation and what firms understand of it, that’s to say online dialog, will become a must-have in the coming years. Because of this very popularization and standardization, online dialog I think will become a commodity and will no longer help companies gain useful insights. It will become yet another communication channel.

« Great » and « failure » may be two words you wouldn’t associate at first.  Yet, it’s the impression which I got whe I recently received the Starbucks newsletter proudly announcing that 150 ideas from the MyStarbucksIdea platform had been implemented. 150 ideas is a lot. Yet it is nothing compared to the 116100 ideas submitted (I summed them up on August, 12^th). It’s actually a mere 0,129% of the grand total.

If those ideas were revolutionary it would be an excellent rate, an exceptional one actually. But what are we really talking about? What are those ideas which have been judged worthwhile enough to be put into practice. I quickly browsed the list of the latest “approved” ideas : enjoy a caramel wafer cookie with your coffee, a new veggie bistro box, mobile payment for Android, a new bottled zero calorie tea, …

It’s hard to evaluate the costs that were required to run MyStarbucksIdea but let’s try anyway.

I found an interview of Starbucks’ CEO on BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081000030457.htm) in which he states that a team of 48 Idea Partners runs MyStarbucksIdea (the interview was performed shortly after the launch of MyStarbucksIdea in 2008). Let’s assume those 48 employees work 220 days / year: it makes 84480 hours per year. The platform was launched in 2008 and has thus ca. 3 years of existence which represents  253440 hours of work. The minimum wage in the US was 7,25$ in 2009 (taking as a basis for the calculation the minimum wage will clearly lead to an under-evaluation of the costs since he “Idea Partners” are white collars workers who certainly earn more than the minimum wage). 253440 hours of work at 7,25$ per hour represent a cost of 1,837,440$, which is 12449$ per idea.

Those 12449$ of course do not include the deployment costs of the ideas.

My take:

You may wonder whether spending 12449$ to follow up and approve each of the 150 ideas is really a bargain. After all you could employ a well qualified marketer for 2 months with that amount of money.

This is however not the point. MyStarbucksIdea remains a wonderful PR tool. It was with Dell’s IdeaStorm one of the first large-scale platform to interact with the customers. Starbucks was a pioneer just like Dell and that’s why they deserve respect. What does remain for the followers? Well, not much. Followers will hope to make a return on investment but they can’t calculate it. Actually how would they calculate it? Followers will see in the platform only the ideas generation part of it and will hope to be able to generate ideas that will help their business grow. They are wrong. The ideas you’ll get from the platform are not what you should be looking for. Those ideas will never be revolutionary and will never help you to launch the next blockbuster.

The real innovation was the platform itself, a new way to interact with the customers, not the ideas which are generated. This platform has existed now for more than 3 years. It’s not new anymore. It’s time to innovate again. Focus your efforts on finding something else to delight and surprise customers; don’t lose your time in copying your competitors or reinventing the wheel.

I already mentioned on this blog the initiative of Solvay (through its subsidiary Solvin) to give awards to its best suppliers.
On July, 28th Ferrari did the same and bought a full page advertisement space in the leading Italian economic newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. The Modena-based company thanked its partners for their flexibility and their capacities to innovate.

It is interesting to notice that this trend aiming at recognizing the links existing between the for and its environment is becoming widespread and a common practice among large firms. The question that should be asked is whether this trend corresponds to a real desire and consciousness of the role of the firm, or to a desire to be trendy.

My review of 40 years of literature has shown that the word “experience” is used by many authors to illustrate co-creation processes.

Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2000) called for «personalized experiences with the customers». Vargo and Lusch (2004) suggest that «experience and perception are essential to value determination». Payne, Storbacka and Frow (2008) suggest that customer experience is one of the five possible co-creation processes. Furthermore they write that the relationship experience is part of customer value-creating processes and can be divided into cognition, emotion and behaviour. Tynan et al. (2009) observe that the processes of value co-creation in the luxury goods business are based on an experience of the brand («the experience concerns interactions and experiences shared with complementary and similarly positioned brands»).

The definition of experience is however not very clear. Reading above citations, one gets the impression that experience depicts the way the customer feels about his/her interaction with the firm’s representative or any other stakeholder within the network of the firm. Is this really an experience? How is the above “experience” positioned within the relatively new but more classic framework of “customer experience”, also called “customer brand experience” or “brand experience”?

The way customers experience a brand is called the “brand experience”. The «brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioural responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments» (Brakus, Schmitt and Zarantonello, 2009).

Brakus, Schmitt and Zarantonello (2009) distinguish between product experience (i.e. the physical or virtual interaction between the consumer and the product), shopping and service experience (i.e. the interactions with the store, the personnel, the practices of the firm) and consumption experience (i.e. the multidimensional experience while the product is being consumed).

From the above it is clear that the experience part of the co-creation processes can be partly categorized under shopping and service experience. However I felt it was too restrictive since the dimension of brand experience in the context of co-creation goes beyond the consumption pattern and the in-shop presence. I have therefore developed a new framework … but it’s too early to publish it here. If you are interested send me an email.

The boundary is thin between customer participation, the ultimate stage of customer involvement, and the networked nature of co-creation. Whereas a community can co-create by itself, customer participation requires the involvement of the firm too. The benefits are however similar for the involved parties and were clearly identified by Payne et al. (2008, 2009): customer learning and organizational learning.

The IT revolution has of course enabled that those learning processes could be implemented at relatively low costs (which was a prerequisite to ensure the buy-in of firms). From the Linux community twenty years ago to today’s community platforms, through online forums, the networked co-creation has evolved at the pace of technology. Among the best examples of how leveraging the communitarian co-creation opportunities is the initiative of Starbucks: mystarbucksidea.com. This website, which can be seen as a co-creation platform shared by the community of Starbucks enthusiasts, allows clients to make suggestions that are visible to the whole community. The suggestions are rated and assessed by Starbucks, the follow-up stage of the idea being visible for everyone.

My take:

I think Linux is more an exception than the rule; a community rarely co-creates by itself without a strong trigger. However poorly managed communities will certainly fail to co-create.

Strong emotional bounds can be found at the heart of successful communities like MyStarbucksIdea. Such a success is however also highly dependant on the efforts put by the firm. It is illusory to think that a passive management of an online community will deliver results. Your involvement has to be active and original. Look at what one of clients succeeded in creating: ProDegustation, the French leader in wine tasting sessions, started creating videos for its Facebook fans and has become the first French-speaking group on wine.