Crowdsourcing has entered the mainstream big-time. It has become daunting to find a brand these days that does NOT have some crowdsourcing program in place.
My Starbucks Idea is just the latest example: Starbucks asks its consumers for advice, and besides certainly receiving a lot of good ideas, the troubled coffee chain makes consumers feel part of the brand remake.
It's the same template as usual: engage your community, harness its creativity, and let it create the content for you.
It works, sure, but it's getting stale. For some reason, marketing trends take two to three years before they are fully embraced, but if they are, then they become annoyingly ubiquitous (remember the "Tipping Point"?).
The reason is simple: Marketing executives are notoriously risk-averse (Seth Godin once reckoned that only if you're willing to put your job on the line will you do something truly innovative in marketing), and a model like crowdsourcing provides the right balance between safety net ("many others are doing it") and cutting edge ("crowdsourcing?" the CEO shrugged).
Crowdsourcing was a disruptive innovation two years ago, but now it's time to innovate crowdsourcing. It is a viable trend that has implications far beyond the marketing profession, but someone needs to take it to the next level.
So in the spirit of crowdsourcing, let me ask you: in the next stage, what could be a more innovative application of crowdsourcing?
The common wisdom is that gas stations make almost no profit off the gas itself (the gas companies make a ton of profit, of course) and must have side businesses like garages and, above all, snack shops to turn a profit.
What if you were to turn that equation on its head and add a "filling station" to, say, a Starbucks? That's the intriguing possibility raised by an article on SFGate about Hyatt Hotels and Tesla Motors, the Google-founders-financed electric car start-up. (It's also been written up on CNET News.com.)
"Hyatt will install Tesla recharging stations at three hotels, stretching in an arc from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe.... By placing rechargers at Hyatts at Fisherman's Wharf, Sacramento and Incline Village on Tahoe's North Shore, a Tesla owner could drive from San Francisco to the lake without fear of running out of juice. Tesla has already driven one of the roadsters from Tahoe back to the company's San Carlos headquarters without recharging, but that was downhill, said Diarmuid O'Connell, Tesla's director of corporate marketing."
The two companies talked up the brand alignment between them, and how a Tesla customer is a Hyatt customer. Whether that's true or not, it's rather more upscale than an oil company aligning itself with, say, a fast food company to supply burgers at its stations.
Hotels are good places for charging because customers will leave their cars overnight. Starbucks could enter the picture when you can charge more quickly.
A separate news item in Technology Review about secretive battery manufacturer EEstore claims that they have a battery technology that will give a range of 200 miles--and charge in less than 10 minutes. If it's true (and there are plenty of skeptics), that would make a Starbucks a perfect place to add a charger. Pull up and park, plug your car in, stand in line for a latte, come on out and you're off with another 200 miles. It would transform the aesthetic and tone of "filling up" from one that has become grimy and unpleasant to one that is clean and faintly European.
The gas station as a "third place." I love it.
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