Can you crowdsource your next big idea? Can the crowd keep your branded products current and relevant? Crowdsource Week (CSW) certainly thinks so. They want to help you get on top of it! And to prove it, they are going to the top of the world to explore the answers to these and other timely questions. That’s right, the Arctic Circle! Their 5-day CSW, Artic // Europe Conference will focus on the very backbone of crowd sourcing and the implications to all brands. The backbone? Decentralization.
They will explore how decentralization made possible by crowdsourcing impacts the trending topics of Finance, ICO’s, Green Bonds, Energy, Sustainability, Innovation, CrowdGaming, Agriculture, Farming, as well as Travel and Tourism in the Shared Economy.
The Industrial Revolution brought us infrastructure and centralized thinking. The Information Revolution is bringing us Crowdsourcing and decentralized thinking. CSW believes decentralization is at the heart of the disruption we have been witnessing. Brands that utilize mass personal connectivity to transact directly with their employees, customers, prospects, and the general population increasingly have the upper hand.
This enables them to dispense with traditional hierarchy where information has to “go through channels” that usually influence, distort, or stifle good ideas. Now that we can access individuals directly, why not take advantage of this new, more immediate, and more authentic form of sourcing those ideas?
The CSW, Artic // Europe Conference will provide numerous speakers on these topics and access to the top experts in the crowdsourcing space.
We know from our own experience building the famous Barefoot Wine brand how important the crowd was to brand development, profile, and marketing. Long before there were terms like crowdsourcing, we made friends in what we called “low places.”
Not meant to be demeaning in any way, on the contrary, these were the decentralized folks who did the actual work in our industry, the ones with dirt under their fingernails. They ran the machinery, drove the forklifts, and stocked the shelves. We asked them, from their point of view, what brands made their job easier and what brands didn’t – and how?
These decentralized “crowd sourced” answers gave us the do’s and don’ts from their real-life state-of-the-art perspective – not from their bosses, and not from the C-Suite on top of a centralized structure. This down-to-earth insight gave us the labeling, signage and packaging that moved easily through the distribution channel.
We supported worthy causes in the hopes that their members would have a social reason to buy our brand. But we also got the opportunity to poll their already existing networks about the taste profile of our branded products. This helped us stay popular, current, and relevant.
That was pre–smartphones – and this is now! Now we can access a bigger crowd or a more precise crowd and do so on a current basis. Brands that haven’t discovered the power of the crowd are setting themselves up to be disrupted. We disrupted the wine industry by accessing the crowd and letting our brand develop democratically. We believed the crowd knew more about product handling and consumer preferences than the folks in the ivory towers. Today accessing this kind of information has been made easier.
So why not take a thrilling trip to Sweden’s remote Artic Lapland for 5 days and find out how the world is changing through decentralized crowdsourcing? Keep your brand relevant. Solve problems in a new way. Source innovation from the crowd. Learn how to transact directly with folks through the latest technologies. The 2018 CSW, Artic // Europe Conference promises to be very cool event – in more ways than one!
