Disadvantages Of Crowdsourcing Essay

3.1 Advantages of crowdsourcing in firms

With crowdsourcing firms can furthermore attract and retain their customers, built brand loyalty and create viral effects, as was done in the above mentioned crowdsourcing campaign of Henkel. It is thus also a way of creating awareness and managing the marketing of a company.

When companies use crowdsourcing as a business strategy, they have to find a way to harness the wisdom of the crowds (Surowiecki 2004) in an effective manner in order to unlock innovation. The wisdom of the crowds is based on the fact, that a group of average people can solve tasks better than an expert.

Crowdsourcing enables a company to reach a broad audience in a short period of time and involve them into the process of problem solving. The created solutions represent the taste of many individuals and have a high impact on the likeability of the product since the consumers of the goods are themselves the product creator, which leads to an increase in sales of the created product.

By opening up

As one can see from the above described case study about Henkel and the logo for Pril, crowdsourcing campaigns can go wrong and damage the company’s reputation. Participants of crowdsourcing projects want to actually have an influence in the work. In Henkel’s campaign the designs were mostly pre-defined and let the participant express very low creativity. Also the fact, that all designs were first checked internally and only then published on the website, left the participants feel not taken seriously by the company. The low expectation of their customers also guided the customers then to upload childish designs circumventing the predefined designs and using the pencil tool from the menu. In order to avoid such situations, the company has to show more respect towards the crowd and signal, how important their input is for the