June 28th, 2010
Dear GE: Own the Innovation Layer
The other day trusty Project Manager Ned spied an article on TechCrunch about how General Electric is crowdsourcing ideas for digital ad campaigns. This is interesting for a couple of reasons:
- It’s another example of a major brand looking to crowdsource ways of making themselves better
- In this case it’s focused on marketing (even though it says advertising, their definition of advertising is over-broad)
- We like to use opportunities like this to flex our brains with, poke at our process, and generally have a good time
- We had not heard of this program from anywhere other than TechCrunch (see The Target Audience, below)
There’s actually precious little information to go on for GE Ads. In the best scenario, this is because GE is treating this not as a one-off contest, but as a long-range funnel for innovative work from unexpected places. In a less-good scenario this is because someone at GE thought that the idea was fun and went ahead with it with little thought (which is not a bad idea in itself).
In any case, we felt we were game, so we spent 120 minutes on it. Here’s how it played out.
Who’s Your Client?
GE has a HUGE breadth of products. We considered focusing on specific products, or even just specific major product categories, but, since we didn’t have any collective expertise in any one area, digging in to any one of them and trying to really understand what GE was doing and where the opportunities were, was beyond the scope of the time limit that we had set for ourselves. Besides, the scope of the request, while open-ended, seemed to be about GE as a brand overall, and not particularly about a product category.
The Target Audience
Again, not having done any sort of discovery (beyond what 30 minutes of web searching will get you), we decided to focus on the average consumer as the target. Business-to-business relationships are tricky to quickly understand if you don’t have some experience with what the target audience wants. On the other hand, we all have experience being a consumer, so it seemed like an easy headspace to get into. Ultimately we narrowed the audience down to Advanced Digital Literates because:
- We are them, so we have some idea of what’s going on there
- This project so barely made our radar (only due to Ned’s keen attention to things like this), but was so squarely targeted at people like us that it seemed to point to an opportunity that we could take advantage of
- It turns out that, not having any information to the contrary, we thought that the broad consumers were probably being served quite well, actually, with the campaigns that GE is currently running (see below for more on this). We’re sure that someone in GE could give us evidence that there is a serious failing somewhere – in which case we’d tackle that more head on – but, barring that, we had to go with what we knew
The Goal
Again, given that there is not much to go on in terms of this project, we took a fairly generic goal:
- Increase brand affinity volume with broad reach
What We Know
At first we didn’t think we knew much about the umbrella brand that is GE with respect to marketing. But it didn’t take us long to realize that GE’s advertising had actually reached us (which was especially surprising to me, as I’m nearly unreachable with advertising – a fact that I’ve decided to take as amusingly ironic). The ad campaigns are broadly inspirational, speak to the positive idea of “imagination” and talk about how GE improves the world. We’d seen ads on TV, and their digital ads were pretty solid. In fact, a campaign that they ran a few years ago, where you could create new ideas on a shared whiteboard, seemed downright inspired (though, of course, we can’t speak to its success).
Insomuch as umbrella advertising doesn’t seek to sell anything directly, these all seemed to be on the right track. And reflecting on our own feelings we came away on the positive side of neutral on GE, which is pretty good for a brand that we don’t knowingly consume on a regular basis (unlike, say, Coke).
Our Key Insight
GE has the opportunity to own a real concept of “imagination” in the marketplace, beyond what they currently do.
Our Strategy
GE creates the groundwork for inspired ideas. GE should provide the digital infrastructure for digital natives to bring new wonderful things into the world. Inspiring innovation and providing the framework in which it can grow.
By doing this, GE reinforces, in a very concrete way, its ownership of “imagination”. It creates affinity for GE in the people who are actually using their imagination to make the world a more interesting place. It also provides an interesting opportunity for GE to expand its business into a new space that is consistent with the image it projects (see the tactics section, below).
Tactical Approach
Specifically, we would like to see GE collect, build, foster, and own tools to help people spark new ideas, nurture those ideas into deeper concepts, and bring those concepts into reality. GE should be the company you think of when you want to figure out something new to bring into the world.
We envision a web site called imagine.ge.com which would provide a range of tools that GE has actively helped develop. Most tools would be free. This would include tools such as:
- Mind Mapping (e.g. FreeMind)
- Brainstorming tools (shared whiteboards and the like)
- Prediction Markets (e.g. Foresight)
- Community Ideation Platforms (e.g. Salesforce’s Community offering, which powers Dell’s Ideastorm, or, ironically, Google’s Moderator, which is what GE is using for this project)
- Community Idea Acceleration Platforms (I don’t know of any in the wild, but have built a couple: systems that allow people to see other people’s ideas and get involved to the degree that interests them)
- Startup funding finders (e.g. Kickstarter)
Basically an entire ecosystem devoted to the imagination/innovation process from creating the initial spark to making the idea a reality. We see this infrastructure as the “ideas” equivalent to Amazon’s Web Services, which provide essential services for new web applications without the need for a company to build the infrastructure themselves.
We imagine GE expanding upon these layers and integrating them into a more complete workflow.
The kicker would be for GE to make this infrastructure the foundation of how ideas grow within GE. This provides added incentive to improve the tools and added credibility to both the tools and to GE as a company that practices what it preaches.
In our biggest version of this concept, GE creates a new business unit around creating “imagination” infrastructure of all kinds (potentially capturing the brand space that Disney evacuated after Walt died), they create a global incubation program, get involved in 3D printing (maybe through the RepRap or MakerBot projects), and buy Adobe both for its creative and technology development tools.
All of this provides additional emphasis on GE’s classic jingle “We bring good things to life”.