Case Studies: Wikification in Action

    In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Federal Express Inc. spent millions promoting its brand. Its slogan – “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” – is one of the best ever.  Its television commercials with the motor-mouth managers still serve as a creative benchmark.

    Yet despite the spending, impact and increasing usage, no one referred to Federal Express by name. Customers just called the firm “Fedex,” no matter how insistently corporate managers “positioned” the firm as Federal Express. So in 1994 Federal Express bowed to reality, and changed its name.

    That was probably the first example of wikification, especially since FedEx announced its first Web site at the same time. Wikification – or the process by which customers define brands based on the economic, experiential or emotional value they receive – represents the biggest force in branding today. Wikification is occurring on Intelliseek, Epinions and other feedback sites, message boards, viral emails and SMSs, water-cooler chat, and other peer-to-peer conversations.

    These networked “conversations” are powerful. One Nike-related site has received more than 3.5 million – yes, million – posts about sneakers. A  Forrester/Intelliseek study found that such postings are much more credible than any type of marketing.

    The power of such interactions will expand exponentially when Yahoo rolls out “My Web 2.0,” a social search engine that will allow Web resources that one person has found useful to be instantly accessible to their personal and professional networks. It will also have annotation capabilities that will, for example, allow individuals to add notes about a personal experience with a company.

    As a result, companies like McDonald's are abandoning failed theories like “positioning” and are now putting customers in the driver’s seat for content, new product and other activities. Wikification represents a successful strategy. According to Harvard Business Review, "over 80% of successful new products are from customer suggestions." By contrast, New Product News estimates that 80% of all products introduced in 2005 will fail.

    Customers are taking charge of almost every aspect of a brand, even to the extent of product development. ''A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products,'' notes Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Turning your brand over to customers can produce pays off. In a study at 3M, von Hippel found that product ideas from customers generated $146 million in revenue. By contrast, sales from internal ideas only generated $18 million.

    Symbolically, journalism is taking the lead in wikification. For generations, editors have “positioned” the news, using a variety of placement and other tools to tell readers “this is important!” In the 1960s about 80% of Americans read a paper every day. Today, only half do. The World Association of Newspapers reports that circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan during 1995-2003. From 1969 to 2004, viewership of the Big Three newscasts declined 59%. The drop is even steeper among 18-34 year olds. If the trend continues, the book The Vanishing Newspaper estimates, the last newspaper will be read in April 2040.

    With their backs against wall, the media is turning to wikification, although they call it participatory or civic journalism. The Los Angeles Times is experimenting with “wikitorials.” The Rocky Mountain News is creating 39 news oriented sites, with most of the material to come from readers. The Greensboro News & Record is working on Web-based initiatives involving reader contributions to become “an online town square.” Newspapers have to move fast to wikify themselves. The South Korean online newspaper relies on 26,000 'reporters' for 80% of its content, and the Web site Wikinews has scooped CNN on the London bombing with its reader-contributed offerings. Forbes has experimented with letting readers pick covers. (Interestingly, they are not the ones the editors pick.)

    Examples abound of companies turning to customers to define their brands. Message-board feedback led Continental Airlines to create a customer service help desk exclusively for its top customers. It also changed the format of its frequent-flier statements and tweaked its Website. More than 120,000 people worldwide joined a “World Design Team,” an online forum that collected ideas and feedback while Boeing developed its new plane. Craigslist, which is the fourth biggest portal with sites in 25 countries despite having only 18 employees and no marketing budget, asked its visitors about the wisdom of proposed strategic changes.

    Customers are also becoming an advertising resource. Coors Light and Mercedes Benz have invited customers to develop future advertising campaigns. A customer suggestion formed the basis of a popular advertising campaign for Coca-Cola in Malaysia. Canadian icon Tim Hortons has hundreds of ideas from customer for its “true stories” series of commercials.

    Seattle-based Jones Soda represents big-gulp wikification. Labels are based on customer photographs and odd quotations. Customers also can post ideas for new drinks on the Web site, and the winning ideas become new offerings.  Similarly, T-shirt company Threadless.com solicits artwork from customers, which is then rated by other customers. The highest rated designs are printed on T-shirts and sold. Designer John Fluevog asks customers to submit shoe designs for voting. In Brazil, Kaiser Beer asked customers for their taste preferences before creating a new beer. Burger King asked Web visitors to design both a burger and a marketing campaign for it. And it was two Deadhead fans who named Cherry Garcia, Ben & Jerry’s most famous ice cream flavor.

    In a similar vein, a division of Nestle USA develops ''tool kits'' of preprocessed food ingredients. These kits, which are identical to those actually used in the factory, are distributed to customers to develop new recipes. Product development time is cut from 26 weeks to only three, and the new recipes become new Nestle offerings.

    The gaming industry is a hotbed of wikification. A year before release, Lucas Arts solicited participation in the design process for a new Star Wars game. Additional feedback was captured as programming continued, with heated debates about such topics as whether any player could become a Jedi Knight. Doom, Quake and other games have also benefited from user-created “mods” that can even change story lines.

    Even cultural icons are being wikified. New York’s MoMA is asking patrons to “hack the gallery experience” by creating podcasts about exhibits. The Tate Museum in London posts captions from visitors next to its greatest works of art.

    Despite the benefits of wikification, most companies are still mired in the past. For example, a survey by the CRM consultancy Peppers and Rogers found that only one in ten companies even asked their customers what they wanted before they built their web site.

    In the mass economy, companies looked at customers as “users” or even as a free source of labor (aka “self-serve”). Later, smart companies realized that customers were a resource, turning to them for beta testing, user groups, customer councils and in-depth research. Now, customers actually shape brands through through their usage, feedback and peer-to-peer communications.

    No matter whether it is called “bottom-up marketing,” “open source branding,” “customer co-creation” or other name, wikification represents the most powerful force in branding today.  Are you going to stand in front of this force with your exquisitely crafted “position,” or are you going use wikification to power your brand to closer customer relationships and deeper brand penetration?

    Note: This is the third and final analysis of the emerging branding phenomenon called wikification. The first analysis was The Death of "Positioning" & The Birth of Brand Wikification and the next was How to Wikify Your Brand. Other blogposts have also covered various aspects of wikification.

    Got more examples of wikification?  Post your examples below.

Comments

[Tara 'Miss Rogue' Hunt]

What Bruce isn't understanding is the true difference between wikification and positioning.

Positioning = company deciding the nature of the brand that they want to public to feel about that brand.

Wikification = the public seeing the brand and making their own decisions on how they feel about that brand.

FedEx rescinded to public desire, not the other way around. Which, I believe, Nick, is your point exactly.

[Nick Wreden]

Yes, Fedex was a change in brand identity, but that is exactly my point. It was a change driven by customers, not by the company.

There numerous differences between dated theories like "positioning" and more current realities like wikification, or "brand journalism," in McDonald's awkward phrase. First, wikification is a customer-driven process (through word-of-mouth, internet, experiences, etc.) rather than a top-down, corporate driven process. Second, a tenet of "positioning" is that an offering always wants to be number one or number two in a market. Customers don't care who is number one or number two in a market (quickly: who's bigger: OfficeMax or Staples? Target/Kohls? John Deere/International Harvester? Even Fedex/UPS?) They only care about the value they receive from a brand. and wikification, unlike "positioning," is a direct reflection of that value. Finally, and most important, "positioning" cannot be measured, primarily because it is based on the famous dictum -- which few CEOs would agree with -- that "mind share is more important than market share." By contrast, customer value can be measured through a variety of metrics.

[Bruce DeBoer]

I'm not sure everyone shares your view of "positioning". The more I read about "Wikification" on this and other sites, the more it feels like web enabled customer feedback that brands use for "positioning".

Your FedEx example - in my mind - isn't so much a change in brand positioning but rather a change in brand identity. There is a big difference between the two.