3 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Co-Creation To Develop Better Products

Despite the glistening hoopla surrounding the utility of social co-creation in building a robust consumer product strategy (CPS), companies are still not applying the concept to good effect. Though there are a handful of case studies showcasing how social media is being used for marketing and customer service purposes, but the application of social technologies for CPS is still apparently not that popular among businesses.
However, perceptibly, the trend is soon going to change, as several companies have started acknowledging the power of social technologies for the whole gamut of business processes, and product development is a significant component of that. Let’s see some of the reasons why this is high-time when you should start leveraging your Fans and Followers-base as your R&D suggesters:

Social co-creation offers you a gold mine of new product ideas, and even helps you cross-check whether an internal idea would translate into a useful product or not. It gives you a unique way of directly interacting with your potential buyers on a regular basis. Further, there’s no or little latency involved when you’re using co-creation for creating market-oriented products.
Although the use of co-creation is still far from universal, CPS professionals have begun exploiting the virtues of the concept in solving product strategy problems. You might be aware of the famous GAP logo saga, in which the apparels major drawn flaks for changing the company logo and eventually resorted to keeping their original logo. If customers have this kind of say in a simple logo design, you could imagine the power of customer-engagement in product development cycle.
Most striking part of co-creation is that the end-users are simply more than interested in participating in the process. You can leverage this pro-active participation as a constructive feedback channel. In fact, social technologies are bringing customers closer to brands in a way never seen before. Apparently, social media users are gung ho about product development irrespective of the kind of business, or products, or services involved in it. Perhaps, getting a useful product is the key factor that’s driving them to go for co-creation.