Crowd-sourcing the Brand Identity itself

Crowd sourcing has been a viable option with a philosophy of ‘a million heads are better than few’, ‘the expertise lies outside of the organization also’, ‘ time taken to design & create products can be reduced ‘

Mostly, organizations have created platforms and avenues where their customers or general public can engage with the organization and give product ideas, help in co-product creation and become part of customer-networks. Some examples of such crowd-sourcing platforms & initiatives are:

• Fiat Mio - create a car
• Open Innovation Sara Lee - open innovation portal of Sara Lee
• P&G Open Innovation Challenge - external idea sourcing in Britain
• Kraft - innovate with Kraft
• Dell IdeaStorm - external idea sourcing
• Vocalpoint - P&G’s network for women
• My Startbucks Idea - shaping the future of Starbucks

Recently, one organization pushed the envelope of crowd sourcing by soliciting ideas & concepts for it’s band identity (logo) from the public. Happiest Minds, a young IT Services start-up, opened up the contest by asking people to submit logo for it’s business. The brief was that the logo should depict the Happiest Minds philosophy, vision, & essence of Happiest People leading to Happiest Customers.

As part of the crowd sourcing contest,  nearly 1400 entries were received and out of these 150 were shortlisted and again, crowd sourcing was done to short list these 150 entries to 25 entries. The public was asked to vote for the design they felt most accurately captured the vision of Happiest Minds. These 25 entries were then evaluated by a jury and 5 were shortlisted for final round.

The logo,  created by Jemin Shingala, was selected as the winner and best reflected Happiest Mind’s business philosophy. The logo was was modified by Shristi School of Design and was unveiled on the day of the launch of the Happiest Mind’s.

No wonder, this experiment proves that in today’s socially connected world, crowd sourcing can be a viable option to get tangible & concrete output — in any possible area. The only challenge  is in being bold and open to make innovative uses of crowd sourcing.

Read the article here for more details:
http://www.happiestminds.com/press-releases/happiest-minds-announces-winner-of-its-logo-contest
http://businessworldindia.com/bw/2011_05_10_Happiest_Minds_Launches_Logo_Design_Contest.html
http://altnews.asia/content/2011/06/29/happiest-minds-logo-contest-receives-over-1000-entries

Search Google for this crowd sourcing experiment: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=happiest+minds+logo+contest