How Smaller Companies Can Benefit from Co-creation

A relatively new concept of marketing is the notion of co-creation. This involves companies continuously interacting with consumers to gain new insights, which then influences the internal decisions a company makes (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). This consumer-company relationship leads to stronger values by including their opinions within the early stages of the innovation process (Witell, et al., 2011).

With many supporting consultancies and new technologies that are able to assist organisations in co-creating and developing marketing strategies, an increasing amount of companies are changing from the traditional linear approach and adopting this flexible way of marketing. Co-Creation has been proven successful for many global organisations include Nike, Amazon and even chocolate brand Milka (The Gild, 2016).

Co-creation: Coca Cola (2013)
One of the most successful case studies can be seen in Coca Cola. After running out of new ideas, the soda-drinks brand turned to eYeka, which was the beginning of their co-creation journey. Through using a global online community, Coca Cola were able to identify innovative and creative ways of marketing to the millennials (Coca Cola, 2013).

The online community meant Coca Cola were able to reach a wider audience, receiving 3,600 responses from customers based in Latin America, Asia and North America. As a result, Coca Cola managed to find out consumer insights and preferences on their products, which led to implementing changes so that the brand met customer expectations (Payne, Storbacka and Frow, 2007). This promoted creative marketing campaigns (for example, this video in promoting happiness) and innovative adaptations to their packaging, such as the Sharing Can and Ice Bottle (above).

Due to the growth of competing products such as sugar confectionery and sharing bars, the chocolate sector has experienced a fall in market share since 2014 (Keynote, 2015).The problems smaller companies may experience due to less resources (including time and finance to perform the required research such as online crowd sourcing) may lead to falling behind larger competitors. For example, chocolate company Montezuma specialising in chocolate blocks and bars, may fall behind competitors as they fail to monitor changes in their customers needs and preferences (e.g. chocolate flavours or packagaing). Whilst larger chocolate brands continue to invest in co-creation and gain competitor advantage. For example Lindt offered customers the option to personalise chocolate bars through their website. As a result, customers were able to share new ideas online which allowed Lindt to understand more of their customers’ needs and preferences.

However there are quick and cost-effective ways that smaller companies can gain consumer insight and values, and then incorporate them into their business and therefore are able to continue as a key player in the market. With the example of Montezuma, methods of A/B testing, offering free samples in-store and Social Media marketing allows monitoring of customer responses (Aabaco, 2016). Through these methods, smaller companies can still communicate with their customers and gain ideas for various marketing productions including new products, promotional offerings and brand development.

Of course in order to fully succeed, companies will have to implement changes to relevant departments as identified through co-creation, for example, changes to the manufacturing process. As you can imagine, over a global corporate company these changes can be costly and cause conflicts from resistance to change. But as the saying goes, ‘the greater the risk, the greater the reward!’ It seems that co-creation is the way forward in order to remain innovative to achieve competitor advantage but also building closer relationships with customers. We are constantly being told that customers are the most important stakeholder of any company, and I can’t see this changing any time soon!

REFERENCES:
Aabaco, 2016. Co-Creating Value Using Social Media Marketing. [Online]. Available at: . [Accessed 31 January 2016].

Coca Cola, 2013. Marketing to Millennials: 5 Ways Coca-Cola Is Embracing Creativity and Innovation. [Online]. Available at . [Accessed 20 January 2016].

Econsultancy, 2012. How Coca-Cola uses co-creation to crowdsource new marketing ideas. Available at: [Accessed 20 January 2016].

Keynote, 2015. Confectionary Market Report. [Online]. Available at . [Accessed 31 January 2016].

Payne, A. F., Storbacka, K and Frow, P. (2007). Managing the Co-creation of Value. Academy of Marketing Science. Vol 36. PP. 83-96.

Prahalad, C. K and Ramaswamy, V., (2004). Co-creation Experiences: The Next Practice in Value Creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing. 18 (3). PP. 5 – 14.

The Gild, 2016. Clients. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 13 January 2016].

Witell, L., Kristensson, P., Gustafsson, A., Löfgren, M. (2011)
Idea Generation: Customer Co-creation versus Traditional Market Research Techniques.
Journal of Service Management, 22(2): 140-159