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Imagine you have a customer who absolutely loves your product and keeps telling all their friends about it — but they have no idea how you make it or any experience in your field. Why not hand them the keys to your new product development lab and let them try to become your next star creator?
It’s not as far-fetched as it might seem. For a company with a robust brand community, turning customers into collaborators is a bold move that can benefit both your patrons and your brand.
The idea for a collaborators program at our company, MJ Arsenal, the glass smokeware brand, arose from the recent craze of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the innovative mechanics of distributing royalties to artists from resales. We created the Maker’s Pass program that taps into our devoted brand community to find the next designers of our bongs and pipes, paying our new creative partners royalties for each sale.
Here are key takeaways for developing a brand community and initiating customer co-creation:
Build Community
The chances of having your brand go viral, and spawning a customer base, increase exponentially when you cast a wide net from the start. If anyone is talking about, writing about, creating content about anything related to what you’ve created, reach out to them by email, direct message, and send them free samples. Get your product in as many hands as possible.
Include your customers in content creation. Ensure that at least half of your content on social media and in catalogs is user-generated, and highlight that.
Foster Community
Hang out with your customers by hosting regular live events online, like Instagram Live, showing off the latest products and accessories and hosting an open-mic for questions and thoughts.
Cultivate collectors by introducing unique, limited-edition products for holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day. Collectors equal repeat customers. Selling someone one bong is great; selling them 25 over five years is even better — especially when collectors benefit from loyalty discounts and leading a subcommunity.
The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify?
Use your platforms to give a shout-out to wholesale partners, like in a weekly spotlight of a retailer to send them foot traffic. When our retail partners win, so do we!
Kindle Collaboration
Start with personal invitations to a small group of fans to collaborate on developing a new product, and give them access to your core product and design team at every step of your process, from ideation to packaging. Later, open the program to a broader community, asking everyone from customers to influencers, artists to novices, to submit ideas and sketches, and then pare those down with a crowdsourcing vote. Or simply open up entries for interested parties by way of email submission on your website. There are many stones to look beneath when reaching out to your community at-large.
Share the profits with a royalty arrangement, paying creators a percentage of each sale. “For every unit sold, Makers earn 10%. Kick those feet up, Maker!” was one of our offers.
Bring radical transparency to the process. When you lead with honesty, it simplifies everything. It allows you to be more efficient, more direct and to work at an optimal pace in a more focused manner. The more people who are looped in, the fewer questions along the way.
Beyond a cut of the profits, incentivize collaborators to fire up sales. Set a minimum amount of sales per month for each collaborator product; we chose 250 units a month across all our sales channels. Add a sweetener: If sales exceed the minimum for 12 months, invite your collaborators to create a second product, and then a third, and keep it going.
Put your community first. This will do nothing but create benefits for your brand long term. Use your networking power, retail power and overall presence and share that with the collaborators. The undertaking is not a charity, but it is giving back to the community who made your brand a success.
Remember that turning customers into collaborators is not foremost about profits. Rather, look at it as a chance to position yourselves as true leaders in your space. If you’ve got enough momentum behind your brand, wield that power for the benefit of everyone.
