The dark side of cocreation

During the EMAC2010 Johannes Gebauer (Innsbruck University, Austria) presented an interesting and quite unusual topic. Under the title « the dark side of co-creation » Johannes presented the results of a research carried out on the Spar business case. For those who don’t know Spar it’s a European group of proximity stores under franchising agreements. I thank Johannes who kindly accepted to put his slides at disposal to make them available to my blog’s visitors.

The business case goes like this. Spar was absent from the online community scene and was wishing to legitimate his presence. It was therefore looking for an event-like action that could mobilize an online community and involve customers. The idea which was chosen for this action was to launch an online contest and let customers design shopping bags. At first sight the initiative seems to make sense. And indeed it was; Johannes reported that ca. 5000 proposals were received, some of them graphically very elaborated. The strange thing was that contributions from 100 countries were received although the action was supposed to be local. Strange …

Anyway … things began to go wrong when the committee (made of Spar’s representatives) had to choose the winner. The choice was made without involving the community which didn’t understand the committee’s choice. Reactions were very loud as you will read from Johannes presentation.

My take:

Wasn’t it a little bit naive from Spar to hope to create an online identity and to legitimate it from scratch in such a short period of time? Shouldn’t have Spar started with smaller actions to build expertise and know-how?

I think there’s one major lesson. When your customers’ involvement is high (and it definitely was the case judging from the time which was spent on elaborating graphical contributions) the ownership for the action tends to go to the customers rather than remain in the firm. This switching process in the ownership can lead to some overreactions because it is also based on emotions. It then becomes counter-productive or at least it doesn’t’ fir with the original intention of the firm. I feel this is what happened to Spar.