Thursday, August 30, 2007

First Two BigTreeTop Idea Games Go Live!



The first game was launched by one of our original testers Goods for Cooks - a great Bloomington cooking goods store. The game, brainchild of Andrew, one of the owners, provides GFC's customers with a chance to help determine the next proprietary coffee blend that they will be offering in the store. If you're a customer of GFC and want to give them some ideas or just vote on the ones that other people have posted, head over to the game before September 7th.

Mother Bear's Pizza - a famous Bloomington Pizza Parlor - has recently joined the BigTreeTop Alpha testing program, and jumped right in today with both feet, launching a "Best NEW Pizza Idea" game to better understand what types of pizzas their customers might really love. The top vote-getter will receive a free pizza. If you fancy yourself an expert on pizza (what red-blooded american doesn't?), post your idea and vote on the ideas you like before September 13th!

Both of these efforts represent exciting, small first steps by these two businesses who a) think that their customers are smart and b) want to involve them more intimately in shaping their business.

The idea game is part of an overall new methodology we're working on for businesses called CLIC (Community, Listen, Implement, Communicate). Different from the more traditional methodology that i might call RIB (Research, Implement, Broadcast - which chunks together a lot of things like design, development, etc - but you get the point), it claims that customers and businesses (as well as their local economies, in the long run) both create value by co-creating the business itself. This can help to solve a few problems simultaneously:
  • Advertising is less about broadcasting to people who may not want to listen
  • Advertising is more about communicating to people who actually care about the business
  • Figuring out what customers want is much easier if one is talking to them regularly
As you might imagine, there is much more to the CLIC methodology, as well as some unadvertised potential outcomes of the Goods for Cooks and Mother Bear's idea games (you'll have to participate to find out), but i will end this post here, with a pretty illustration, because illustrations are cool.


No comments: