Despite market researchers’ best efforts, reams of data, projective models and pricey forecasting studies, it is estimated that 80 percent of all new products fail. Lack of relevance, lack of differentiation, inappropriate pricing, muddled messaging—all of these factors can make or break the adoption and success of a new product. And all of these judgments are made by consumers, the constituency whose voice is too often absent from the New Product Development process in the front end of innovation.

Hence, the growing corporate passion for “customer co-creation.” But what do academics, marketers and social media experts mean by this term? O’Hern and Rindfleisch describe it as “a collaborative new product development (NPD) activity in which consumers actively contribute and select various elements of a new product offering.” Here are a couple of commonly cited examples of co-creation:

• Vitamin Water turned to its Facebook fans to help choose its latest flavor, design its packaging and ultimately name the product. Structured as a contest, fans submitted their ideas and voted on the ideas of others. The fan that came up with the final naming idea received $5,000 for her efforts.
• Mountain Dew recruited fans and followers from Facebook and Twitter to participate in their “DEWmocracy 2” campaign. Fifty consumers were sent taste-test kits and asked to make videos of themselves trying the seven different flavors. Three flavors were selected from the videos. Mountain Dew then reached out to its broader social media base to vote on names and packaging.

There’s no doubt that these creative campaigns were successful in terms of consumer engagement and generating word of mouth. Giving consumers a choice among flavors or allowing them to suggest and vote on names and packaging undoubtedly gave them a sense of investment in the project and, by extension, the brand, making them more willing to spread the word about their efforts to their social networks. However, these are largely marketing efforts.