Crowdsourcing has been much debated recently, with Unilever’s move to ditch their agency and Dan Woods suggesting that crowdsourcing as a concept is, in fact, non existent – that it hurts the idea of the individual inventor.

In an exciting development, Kraft in Australia have managed to harness the power of crowdsourcing just to, well, piss off the devoted customers of their Vegemite brand. The snack is an incredibly popular local spread (the nutty Australian I met on my gap year in England had in fact, sectioned off a part of her backpack just for a few months supply of the stuff – hi Christina, wherever you are!).

When they needed a name for a new version of the product, Kraft turned to the public to ask for their brilliant ideas. The winning one: iSnack2.0. CRINGE!

They now suggest that they’ll be running the competition again. After much indignation from the public, many more people will no doubt take part in the second round of the new product naming.

Our local crowdsourcing expert, Idea Bounty Captain Dan, tells me he thinks the whole campaign was a brilliantly executed strategy to get more entries. Perhaps this is true, but they’ve done a certain amount of damage.

So what are the issues here? Firstly, given the criticism of crowdsourcing as using the views of many average participants – rather than the crafting of a brilliant idea by experts – Kraft’s move suggests that crowdsourcing has failed in this case.

As we’ve often argued – you need to understand the medium and use it well – with structures in place. Lots of ideas is a great thing – but you need to make sure the brief is put forward so that its goals are understood and that you carefully consider which is the best one. In Idea Bounty’s case, it would be the brand manager for the brand and the skilled minds of the Idea Bounty platform.

Dan tells me they’ve sold 3 million bottles of the stuff since this campaign has launched. So is it a brilliantly orchestrated PR campaign? Kraft have sold product, so it may have worked out for them, but we’re left asking whether they are investing in the power of a country’s worth of ideas or abusing the concept for PR value.

The serious supporters of the brand have stepped up – even if out of anger – to defend a brand they care about. Kraft have responded very quickly to the unhappiness, saying immediately that they will rename the brand.

Kraft may benefit from this campaign (which remains to be seen) but I suspect Crowdsourcing suffers for it.