Another first for the blog to see us into the bank holiday weekend – this time we welcome Julian Schollmeyer, our Client Services Manager based out of Berlin, with the salutary story of a German social campaign… ^MF

It started out as just another social media crowdsourcing campaign along the lines of Walkers’ ‘Do Us A Flavour‘ and Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy.

“Pril”, the well-known brand of washing-up liquid from German FMCG company Henkel, was due for a makeover. Henkel launched a campaign on the net where users could design their own ‘individual’ bottle using a tool set with mostly predefined graphics (i.e. colourful flowers, birds etc) to stamp on the virtual label. The two designs with the most votes would then hit the shelves in October. So far, so predictable.

However, having users stamp pre-defined flowers on a label and then hailing it as a crowdsourcing campaign struck copywriter Peter Breuer as, frankly, lame. So he chose the pen from the tool menu as his weapon of choice and produced a more, well, unique design – then asked his followers on Twitter to vote for it:

His idea? Chicken flavoured Pril!

His design quickly went up to number one and blogs as well as news magazines were quick to cover the story, resulting in even more votes.

Looking at this, I’d say Henkel had it coming, but maybe they had a premonition that something like this might happen, as they built in insurance: the fact that an internal jury would choose two designs from the top ten. Surely there’d be two designs in there containing only those lovely flowers and birds!? Well, there are, but Peter’s Chicken flavoured Pril inspired a lot of people to upload their weirdest ideas and see if they can steal one of the top positions; at the time of writing this is the leader.

As the story unfolded, blogs and online magazines discussed the bigger issue here: what does a crowdsourcing campaign need to look like if it wants to be taken seriously, and how could the Pril campaign have been better designed?

In the meantime, Peter Breuer stated on Facebook that he in no way intended to protest against Henkel or its brand Pril and that he never imagined that his doodle of a chicken would cause such broad repercussions. However, he was pleased to see that bloggers and media alike posed the question whether a campaign like this can actually be classified as being an effective marketing tool. He adds that he would like to see social media being used more for benevolent and socially beneficial purposes instead.

I’m confident that the next German crowdsourcing campaigns will look very different, and that this will mainly be thanks to the learnings from the Pril campaign.

How would *you* have improved the project?

Tags: crowdsourcing, henkel, pril, social media, word of mouth