Reto Hofstetter

Marketers are often older than the audiences they are trying to reach, making it a challenge to connect. A new study examines the marketing generation gap and suggests some ways to narrow it.

When the Swiss soft drink company Rivella was looking to launch new flavors in 2012, it used an open innovation platform to ask consumers for ideas and received 800 responses. As managers sorted through them, they noticed that one in particular—for a health-oriented ginger-flavored drink—appeared to be extremely popular. But on closer examination they saw that much of the buzz around it was coming from just a handful of participants who were working feverishly to elicit votes and comments. “It was a very small group of consumers who were rallying one another and generating a lot of noise,” says Silvan Brauen, who oversaw Rivella’s innovation pipeline. Despite the strong online feedback, the company concluded that the ginger flavor would flop in the market and abandoned the idea.

Although companies use crowdsourcing more and more to fill their innovation pipeline, it is not so easy to get people to submit their ideas to online innovation platforms. Our data from an online panel reveal that 65% of the contributors do not come back more than twice, and that most of the rest quit after a few tries. This kind of user churn is endemic to online social platforms — on Twitter, for example, a majority of users become inactive over time — and crowdsourcing is no exception. In a way, this turnover is even worse than ordinary customer churn: When a customer defects, a firm knows the value of what it’s lost, but there is no telling how valuable the ideas not submitted might have been. Despite this limitation, companies still get a lot out of crowdsourced ideas. Encouraged by early successes, many now routinely use crowdsourcing contests to find fresh solutions to various problems, increasing the demand for innovators willing to share their ideas. PepsiCo, for instance, has already used contests nine times to crowdsource creative Super Bowl commercials for its Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand, offering prizes of up to $1 million for the winning submission. Other companies, including GE, DELL, and Starbucks maintain their own platforms on which they continuously source ideas from customers.

This study compares the performance of four commonly used approaches to measure consumers' willingness to pay with real purchase data (REAL): the open-ended (OE) question format; choice-based conjoint (CBC) analysis; Becker, DeGroot, and Marschak's (BDM) incentive-compatible mechanism; and incentive-aligned choice-based conjoint (ICBC) analysis. With this five-in-one approach, the authors test the relative strengths of the four measurement methods, using REAL as the benchmark, on the basis of statistical criteria and decision-relevant metrics. The results indicate that the BDM and ICBC approaches can pass statistical and decision-oriented tests. The authors find that respondents are more price sensitive in incentive-aligned settings than in non-incentive-aligned settings and the REAL setting. Furthermore, they find a large number of "none" choices under ICBC than under hypothetical conjoint analysis. This study uncovers an intriguing possibility: Even when the OE format and CBC analysis generate hypothetical bias, they may still lead to the right demand curves and right pricing decisions.