James Cherkoff from Modern Marketing supplied an example from GE in response to my request for a case study demonstrating a new marketing initiative. I asked James for a case study that would demonstrate the before, during and after effects of putting the customer in total control. I was specifically interested in evidence of increased competitiveness. The GE initiative, titled Imagination Cubed, seems to be an online game designed to encourage collaboration. The game is played by drawing a picture and then sending it to someone. You can collaborate with someone else and create a drawing together. These are the results of the GE campaign:
Drawings: over 3,151,00
Global Appeal: sessions have taken place in 201 different countries
Most Popular, By Geography: U.S. (747,000+ sessions), Canada (443,000+),
India (382,000+), United Kingdom (338,000+), Australia (218,000+)
Viral: over 171,000 invitations sent via email – 88% open/response rate from friends who received emails/invitations
Can anybody tell me what these results signify? Anybody guess at what percentage of these drawings were created by customers or prospects? Did GE sell more aircraft engines after doing this campaign? Did they create more bidding opportunities for their waste water business? Anybody buy more resin? Market cap increase? How does this put the customer in control? Maybe somebody from GE might want to respond. And my good friend James is welcome to elaborate.
Learn how to wage and win battles for market share. Download the free PDF preview of the Art of Attack. Just click to get the PDF. There are no forms to fill out, you don’t need to leave your email address. No annoying questions to answer. Just click and get your PDF.
Hi Mike, I don't know about resin tonnage but I can tell you why GE in the US are so delighted with this project, as they provided me with these stats. GE wants to put innovation at the centre of its business and saw the "Pen" and now "imagination3" campaigns as an innovative simple way to communicate this. However, they were (very) surprised at their popularity and the extent to which they could create a community of suppliers, customers, and employees around a simple, relatively, inexpensive idea. I have a lot of examples of such stats - which I use in workshops and consultancy to help 'ground' the ideas of open source marketing, which as you rightly point out, have to be justified at a commercial level if companies are going to continuie expanding the range and scope of customer participation.
Posted by: James Cherkoff | 01 April 2006 at 11:58 PM