Consumer Creativity and Independent Communication

Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind illustrated the effects of technology advancement to human creativity evolution.7 The primitive hunter evolves to the farmer, then to the blue-collar worker, progresses to a white-collar executive and finally to an artist.

In The Rise of Creative Class, Richard Florida justified that we are beginning to work and live the way creative people like artists and scientists always have. This is important because creativity is the driving force of economic growth. Florida’s research shows that the U.S. states which have the biggest population of Creative Class are the ones that have the highest growth.8 These creative people are the ones that will shape the future market where traditional marketing will not work. It is the market where according to The Economist, not only is the customer the king: he is also the market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager.9 To these consumers, top-down, one-way, and mass communication is no longer effective. Today is the era of customer’s independent voice. In this era, communication is build based on customer aspirations. 

No matter what approach that you take, advertising or PR, you must create personal conversations among the customers. To create these personal conversations, you should promote their freedom to talk about you. A featured story on Advertising Age showed how Burger King, for example, tries to cater to the anxieties and desires of the creative consumer market. Like their slogan “Have It Your Way”, Burger King encourages everyone to create videos about Burger King their way for video iPod. In cooperation with Heavy.com, a youth-focused broadband video site that features a heavy dose of user-created content, it gives freedom to everyone to create a video using a Burger King mask. Heavy.com sent out 25 masks to the site’s frequent contributors and received a dozen videos in return. 

The most phenomenal video is the one that shows a woman doing a striptease. The woman performing seducing acts in the video suddenly changes into a man wearing a King mask. Can you imagine? Burger King icon was used for striptease viral video. Is this initiative a bad PR for Burger King? Not really. 

The racy video has invited over 4.1 million downloads by Heavy.com users, which mostly are males ages 18 to 34, the sweet spot of Burger King’s marketing target. The initiatives turn up to be a good “advertising” and “PR” for Burger King. Advertising Age even dubbed Burger King as the “King” of marketing communication. Consider also the LEGO case. The company enlists influential consumers as online evangelists. Following the launch of its new locomotive kit which was shown to 250 LEGO train fans, their word-of-mouth helped the first 10,000 unit sell out in 10 days with no other marketing.