Leveraging The Power Of Crowds
By Alec Lynch -- Graphic Arts Online, November 1, 2008
Printing businesses are increasingly turning to a McDonald's-style “would you like fries with that?” strategy to support and grow their businesses. Intense market competition has many printing firms seeking to add value to print by offering their clients design services, printing management, mailing, fulfillment and specialty services. Options for delivering such services have largely been achieved either through outsourcing or bringing services in house, activities that can be costly and yield marginal returns. In the graphic design space, printing firms can now adopt a new, better model for offering their customers design services.
Printers that offer (or wish to offer) graphic design to their clients can now leverage the power of Internet communities to maximize investments in outsourcing and adding value. Let me introduce you to the world of “crowdsourcing.” Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing to a large group of distributed people via the Internet. Compared to outsourcing and “in-sourcing,” crowdsourcing is faster, cheaper and (most importantly) gets the best design possible for any given budget through an open call to contributors who compete with one another.
Crowdsourcing is different from outsourcing as a task or problem is outsourced to a large group of people (including professionals and amateurs) rather than a single organization or person. It is a model that yields a better outcome because it eliminates group think and gives designers incentive to work harder. It is faster process than outsourcing as it eliminates time spent quoting or shopping around for the “right” provider, and offers access to a global design community that never sleeps.
Our company, DesignBay.com, was founded on the principle that great creativity can come from an agency or the person sitting next to you. We are an online marketplace (powered by hundreds of design studios and freelancers from the U.S., U.K., Australia and India) that allows businesses, printers and marketers to “crowdsource” graphic design work by posting design contests on our website and inviting designers from around the world to submit their designs. DesignBay aspires to shake up the graphic design, marketing and advertising industries. We believe creativity exists everywhere and reputation counts for nothing.
Printers can harness the power of crowdsourcing by implementing these concepts, or using DesignBay to execute design projects (for logo design, business card design, brochure design or other graphic design) on behalf of their customers. Printers can add or improve their current revenue from graphic design by re-selling and/or white-labelling DesignBay designs to their customers. Printers can also more closely control their margins on a customer-by-customer level and minimize the cost of in-house designers.
Psychology icon Carl Jung believed in the Collective Unconscious; DesignBay believes in Collective Creativity, where everyone gets a chance, competition drives a better result and creativity is accessed as a global pool of talent. Start asking your customers “Would you like designs with that?” and begin leveraging the power of crowdsourcing.
