Would you use chicken flavoured washing up liquid?
The German FMCG company Henkel has been established for 135 years. It has nearly 50,000 employees worldwide working in 3 business areas: Landry & Home Care, Cosmetics/Toiletries and Adhesive Technologies.
Oh, and in the near future it may well have chicken flavoured washing-up liquid…
Crowdsourcing ideas is a very topical subject at the moment. The concept behind Crowdsourcing can be found in its name where it is literally a “crowd” of people who source an idea.
The well known washing-up liquid brand “Pril” is one of the brands of Henkel. It was due a bit of a facelift and Henkel launched a campaign on the internet whereby people could design their own label for a bottle of washing up liquid.
People could load up their designs onto a website and the two designs with the most votes would go into production.
The website where people could create their designs was created with various predefined graphics to use. These graphics were fairly standard “stamps” of items such as flowers and birds which would typically be found on a label of a washing-up liquid bottle.
However, one particular individual by the name of Peter Breuer noticed that as well as the pre-defined stamps there was also a pen function. He then used this pen function to design a washing-up liquid bottle label with a chicken neatly drawn on it.
Mr Breuer is a copyrighter with a significant Twitter following and he asked his followers to vote for his design.
As a result it soon shot to the top of the voting lists.
Interestingly though it also resulted in a rush of other designs with how can I say it, but limited flowers and birds on them.
The competition is still going but the current most voted for design is shown to the left and clearly doesn’t have too many flowers and birds on it.
I guess that this is a lesson for companies that are thinking of running crowdsourcing competitions. In the future it may be an idea to get a panel of judges to choose say the top 10 entries with the public voting for the winner.
Then again, there is a saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” so if people end up buying chicken flavoured washing-up liquid later this year then Henkel will surely have something to crow about.
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