#jit6-7

[agiomuso]

"Simply" General Mills

General Mills is one of the largest food companies located in the United States.  In order to generate innovative concepts from crowdsourced partners, General Mills has created the General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-WIN).  By teaming up with world-class innovators from outside the company, they can help General Mills to deliver new levels of taste, health, and convenience in their products. 

General Mills always seeks ideas that will help the firm deliver breakthrough innovation in any area of operation.  The G-WIN open call encourages consumers to go on their website and click the “Submit a Novel Proposal” tab to suggest product or technology innovation useful to General Mills and its businesses. 

One specific crowdsourcing project that the company did using its G-WIN brand community was its Pillsbury “Simply” products.  The General Mills I-Squad team (where “I” stands for Innovation) conducted research behind the “simply” concept.  General Mills found that there was a new, popular mindset of consumers to live more simply.   In order to response to this mindset, the I-Squad team conducted in-depth, in-home interviews where they were able to define 8 defining characteristics that people associated to simplicity.  The new mindset they were trying to understand was the popular yearning to live more simply.  One characteristic was a trust in the inherent goodness of basic ingredients the consumer can pronounce.  Pillsbury then launched two batches of “simply” chocolate chip cookies and “simply” peanut butter cookies.  This “simply” was such a success that it expanded to other General Mills product categories because it responded to consumer wants.

At General Mills, their goal is to make consumers’ lives healthier, easier, and richer.  Because millions of people around the globe enjoy their products every day, they count on new product innovation to help them to continue to meet the evolving needs of those consumers.  The main goals in the “Simply” project were accomplished by using both solution generation and solution evaluation.  The company was able to come up with products that fit the consumer’s desires and concerns with food products. 

[clementinepiau]

Apple's communities

1) I have chosen to work on Apple's brand community because it is a huge community all around the world. The community affiliation includes shared activities, values, or goals hence it is considered as a pool. I reckon that within Apple's community there are several community roles such as Celebrity, Greeter, Guide and Ambassador. Indeed, this community mainly relies on blogs and forums where people can share ideas about the products or help each other with the use of the Apple products and applications and these facts refer to the Guide and the Greeter roles. In this community, people are not reluctant to let people enter the community, on the contrary, the more people there are in the community the better. Also, this community focuses on promoting the brand and sharing their idea: everybody who owns an iPhone is proud to be part of the community. Besides, there are people in the community who are famous members, they are the Celebrities of the community since they have a strong influence on the others. As for the community scripts, I would say that Apple's community scripts is similar to the sewing circle and it is linked to the community roles I have quoted above: Guide. Actually, the members of Apple's community share their experience on blogs and forums and can find any support on these websites.

2) The following blog http://www.cultofmac.com is dedicated to Apple community. It provides advice and critics on the products. This blog does not mention any participation in a WOMM campaign. The authors seem to be very focuses on providing smart and useful content for the readers. Thus, they have comments and critics about Apple products and services. Besides, they are clearly defined as one of the best information source. The blog is communal and implicit, that is the reason why I believe its communication strategy is Evaluation. As for the community reaction, I would say it is more neutral and even negative regarding WOMM campaign. They do not have hostility toward opinion leaders, they listen their advices and often comment.

3) Apple used crowd complementors as a crowdsourcing project. Indeed, they used "crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hot spots and tower locations to determine the user's location." (http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/apples-iphone-4s-uses-crowdsourcing/7320). The challenge was to access to these technological information and to get results from that. Thus, they used apps and iOS to find out the user's location. The project was pretty effective as Apple was able to situate its users and used the information to offer them suggested apps for example.

4) The point of the crowdsourcing project was to improve proposals that Apple makes to its consumers based on their location. Indeed, the purpose was to find information that prove Apple's researches that is why it was solution generation. To accomplish the goals, Apple used trials and analyze the results they got. I reckon this was a good way to understand what the customers expect from the brand and from its devices.