The Game-Changing Aspects of Sourcing Creative Online

Exchanges for Specialized Marketing Tasks Give Great Value and Service.

When Virginia Reynolds founded Insight Quality, a consulting service that specializes in providing clients with expertise in IT quality assurance processes, she wanted a logo designed professionally for her start-up-but she only had start-up money.  

So she turned to a Web site that produces logos for customers in as little as seven days with sometimes hundreds of designs to choose from. And sites like this tell a two-sided story to marketers:

• The Internet is driving the cost of services for businesses to an unimaginably low level. Besides her time, Virginia's total cost was $412-a $12 fee and a $400 prize for the designer-although she could have run a contest for as low as $250.
• This cost structure is bad news for marketing agencies providing services such as logo design or other functions that are adaptable to expert sourcing.

Exchange sites like this have revolutionized the process of engaging in marketing services in many ways. Specifically in logo design:

• Virginia, in the parlance of the site, as the Contest Holder or CH, had to learn how to be articulate in describing the results of logos that were submitted in order to get the best possible outcome. She reported, "I got really sucked into the process in a good way. It might have been the fact that it was a contest or just the interaction with the designers." As designers submit logos, she can give very specific feedback to them and they are able to revise and get back to her. Also, all designers can see the feedback she gives to the other designers so they get the benefit of this intelligence for their own submissions.
• The breadth of submissions was stunning. "Not only did I get a really good logo, but I got 279 submissions which represented well over 100 different concepts (some of the submissions were variations in color or small tweaks.)"
• Geography of the client and the designer are irrelevant. The winner of Virginia's contest is Bordo who is based in Germany. She also got submissions from Canada, Indonesia and other very remote locations.
• If you can't find a winner among the entries received, the CH can extend the contest and invite some of the top designers to submit.
• You can send the URL with all the entries to friends and colleagues to get their feedback as well.

Virginia looked at a few other logo sites including one owned by HP, but ended up going with Logo Tournament. The information she gave to the designers, the winning logo [pictured] and some of the other entries are still available for a peak.  (Designers who didn't win have the option of withdrawing their designs from public view after the contest is over.)

Some other marketing sites that gather experts of interest are NameThis-you can guess what they do-and one of the biggest for deep-dive market research is Gerson Lehrman Group. In a slightly different twist, the publisher HarperCollins ran a contest for the book Freakonomics to get ideas for best guerilla marketing campaigns.
 
Note: This post was written with help from Anne Kinard, QuantumMedia.com