In March this year, Capitec Bank - South Africa’s fastest growing and most innovative retail bank - was named as one of the "Great Brands of Tomorrow” by Swiss financial institute, Credit Suisse and was the only brand to come from Africa. In order to capitalise on this accolade Capitec Bank decided to try something very different - they opted to try their hand at crowdsourcing.

Idea Bounty was their chosen crowdsourcing platform, and on 12 March they posted a brief seeking fresh print and online banner concepts that would illustrate the accolade Credit Suisse had bestowed upon them. The brief was live for less than a week and received over 600 submissions - you can read more about the results here.

The really fantastic thing about Capitec Bank’s crowdsourcing project was the speed and turnaround time. The winning concepts were executed and ran for the first time just over two weeks after the brief went live. This is an extremely good example of how crowdsourcing can be effectively applied as a tool in a brand’s marketing strategy. I had a chat with Charl Nel, Capitec Bank’s Brand Custodian, to find out more about their motivations for using crowdsourcing and what they learnt from the experience.

To kick off could you give us a brief background on Capitec Bank and what the normal process was to source creative ideas for advertising and other campaigns before you launched your first crowdsourcing project?
 
The brand is now nearly ten years old. That said, it is still one of the newcomers to the very traditional banking industry in South Africa. The four traditional banks have dominated the industry for many years. This all is changing with our non-traditional approach to banking. In the past, we used one advertising agency for most of our communication needs. This has changed since 2008 and we now team up with different agencies based on each one’s individual strengths. Our digital agency, for instance, differs greatly from our PR agency and from our advertising agency.
 
You recently posted a brief on Idea Bounty looking for an advertising concept. Can you tell us more about this project and what motivated you to try crowdsourcing?
 
As the brand and the bank have evolved over time, we’ve realised that we need to approach everything we do in a non-traditional way if we want to deliver a non-traditional banking experience to each client. So we use non-traditional thinking in the way we recruit, do our collections, train our people and then obviously also in how we communicate. Crowdsourcing therefore forms part of our non-traditional approach to marketing.
 
What were your thoughts and feelings on the outcome of this crowdsourcing project? Were there any major learnings?
 
The response was overwhelming. We realised that creative ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere – a great idea can come from a housewife in Romania, a municipal worker in Lusikisiki and a lawyer in own legal department. We used to think and believe that creative ideas are the sole property of, say, marketing departments or advertising agencies. The housewife, municipal worker or legal department colleague may not provide consistently good or great communication ideas. But for a specific brief they might just bring insight to the table that we do not think of in the normal or traditional approach. Crowdsourcing, as a non-traditional approach to source creative ideas, has really opened up our minds.
 
How did you make the winning idea your own once you had selected it? How do you execute someone else’s idea in your studio?
 
Working with someone else’s idea always brings challenges. The way you interpret and execute it may differ from what the source had in mind. However, if your own creative team understands the brand well, you can work with any idea and implement it successfully. An experienced team can even add to the original idea and make it even more powerful.
 
It’s been said that crowdsourcing is an exploitation of creative’s Ideas. What is your opinion on this? Is it unethical to use a crowd to produce ideas while only rewarding a select few?
 
One obviously needs to purchase those ideas that you use. The Idea Bounty process describes this well in its contract. Exploitation only happens when ideas are used and not paid for. 
 
What would you say are the most important things to think about before embarking on a crowdsourcing project for a brand or business?
 
You need to know what you want from the process, and you need to decide how confidential your brief is. If you are sourcing ideas for something that your opposition cannot copy, this is a good method to use. However, to discuss your strategy for the following year is probably not the wisest thing to do because crowdsourcing is a very public process. This is also an open and transparent process which means you need a thick skin as some will use the openness to vent anger or for another agenda. So, it all depends on how you handle criticism and the debate that may follow. Inexperienced marketing departments should not use this method as you need to really understand your brand to be able to leverage the ideas.
 
Do you think crowdsourcing can work for any business and any problem?
 
I would not go as far to say that it can solve any business problem. It can definitely be used for big or small companies as the value of crowdsourcing is about getting varied ideas at a fixed cost. However, it won’t work when you are working with confidential issues.
 
What are the most difficult and the most rewarding things about crowdsourcing?
 
The hardest thing is working through the ideas. But this is also the most exciting. What is so rewarding is that one brief can bring you 600 different ideas that were filtered down to 300 in our case. So, you don’t need to go back again and again to ask the same team to come up with different approaches. I can guarantee you that one of the ideas will be the perfect solution based on your specific brief. So, it is cost-effective and it saves you a considerable amount of time as you don’t have to sit through one presentation after another to find your bright spark.

Also check out:

• Crowdsourcing Websites
• The Best Ideas Get Paid. Simple.