Crowdsourcing the perfect donut

Customer Engagement

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Crowdsourcing the perfect donut

Submitted by Brian Skepys on April 20, 2010 – 10:57 am4 Comments

Here’s something to dip into your morning’s cup-o-joe. Dunkin’ Donuts just crowdsourced their way to 12 new doughnut varieties. And the head of research and development? You.

The new flavors, which go by names like “Mango Fandango” and “I Like You a Latte”, are the result of DnD’s “Create Dunkin’s Next Donut” contest, which allowed everyday donut daydreamers to build their own virtual donut on the DnD site, pitting against thousands of others, and share their designs with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

But was DnD taking their consumer input seriously, or is it just some ploy to get people to eat more donuts? Well, a banana-crème/chocolate/Reese’s Peanut Butter donut sounds pretty good to us, so we’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Besides the yummyness, the numbers don’t lie. There were about 30,000 blog posts about the contest in the past 3 months, and the second you open the DnD Facebook fan page of 1.2 million fans you are greeted with hundreds of discussions about the contest and links encouraging you to participate, as one fan writes:

“Loved the 2009 WINNER …TOFFEE FOR YOUR COFFEE ! I’m droolin…..”

Consumer R&D through social media (aka Crowdsourcing) isn’t a new concept. Last month we talked about how Unilever did it and the crazy positive effects of Coca-Cola’s Vitaminwater Flavor Creator campaign on their overall social media presence is hard to dispute.

In the end, even if your donut loving brethren don’t come up with a groundbreaking idea, at least you increased your social media fan base (and your sales) at relatively little cost. And who knows? Maybe that business-changing donut is only a click away.

4 Comments »

DonnyPapic says:

April 20, 2010 at 11:10 am

Crowdsourcing the perfect donut http://bit.ly/ailXy8

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
skepys says:

April 20, 2010 at 11:51 am

SMI: Crowdsourcing the perfect donut http://bit.ly/ca8sFj

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Why Hollywood should buy more Tweets and other brands should stay away | Social Media Influence says:

June 17, 2010 at 2:12 pm

[...] This! — In April, Dunkin’ Donuts launched a major crowd-sourcing campaign, asking the general public to channel their inner Homer Simpson to devise the next great donut [...]
Start-up spotlight: iWikiPhone taps crowdsourcing for the next killer app | SMI says:

August 6, 2010 at 11:02 am

[...] people involved and talking about a product or service. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts made a contest to crowdsource the perfect donut, and they gained extra online publicity and a new fan-conceived [...]