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India Co-creates > Tanishq's My Expression
Younomy brings you latest news, interviews, analysis, case studies, and industry reports on how Indian companies and organizations are co-creating value by tapping the wisdom of crowds.
Tata's Tanishq Co-creates New Jewellery Category for Office Going WomenTanishq, India’s largest jewellery brand, has become the country’s first jewellery company to launch a co-creation project. Its ‘My Expression’ is an open for all contest aimed to identify and reward the best creative minds across the country to submit ideas for Mia – the new Working Women’s line. The contest is on till February 14, 2012. Once ideas are collected, through an online poll system, public will vote for their favourite ideas and the top ideas will make it to the Jury Selection round, after the end of which, the top 10 will win the cash prize of INR 1,00,000 each.
Interview
In an exclusive interview, Gaurav Bhuwan, Head, Marketing, Tanishq India, shares his company’s views on co-creation, how and why it has designed the My Expressions co-creation project. Gaurav has experiences of the Retail Industry in India as well as the USA. In his various roles spanning across India and the USA, he got exposed to Retail Strategy, Retail Operations Management, Brand Building and Advertising. Excerpts from his interview:
Co-creation is emerging mainstream. What do you think are the potential business processes where co-creation can be applied by a fashion jewellery product company like Tanishq? Co-creation can be applied in a lot of areas in jewellery making and marketing such as product design, creation, and advertising. We can get specialized technical inputs from people. I would say that with the participation of customers, we can co-identify even the right retail access points. Wherever there is customer involvement, there is an opportunity for co-creation. Generally, businesses experiment with co-creation mostly in the areas where the participation of customers is inevitable. What were the specific objectives or goals for you to try co-creation in the first place? The jewellery consumer is evolving very fast. She has lots of opinions. She wants to have a say in everything. She demands two way communication. So, there is a need for jewellery brands to create channels for customer participation. This is the key reason. With specific reference to My Expressions, we want to co-create a new jewellery category itself. Today, the working women in their late twenties and early thirties feel that jewellery is a traditional and serious product, suitable only for special occasions. This is detrimental to the growth of the business. When there are formal ware in clothing for working women, they have to use same old jewellery for office as well. There is a need to evolve a new work-wear jewellery category. For this, we need to take the consumer on board, get her ideas, and engage with her in the process of making her jewellery. It is considered important to have an exclusive social co-creation team or a team with specific co-creation mandates to manage the co-creation project. Sometimes that requires tapping the expertise of consultants or partnering with external organizations. How did Tanishq go about building a team for its first ever co-creation contest? We do not have a dedicated team for co-creation yet but we have people who are working on this project full time throughout the contest period. Our team comprises people from marketing, manufacturing, and design. It is a multi-function team. Fortunately, there is a top management alignment. We believe that the philosophy of co-creation is real and it is here to stay. We have tied up with an agency to do social media monitoring. End of the day, we are largely an offline company, but our customers are largely online. Any experience they have with the brand gets narrated online. So it is import to find and listen to the online conversations that are happening around us. Who are your target participants of Myexpression? What is their typical demographic profile? How active are they in social media channels? We are aiming to engage with working women in the age group of 25-35 with this project. But ideas can come from anyone - even possibly from men. Our target group is quite active in social media. We have a strong presence in Facebook with over 1,66,000 friends. We have been active in Twitter, and Youtube too in the last one and a half years. What are the factors that motivate jewellery customers to take part in the co-creation project? The top 10 finalists stand to win INR 1,00,000 each. The selected idea will be used to the next collection for Mia. Though we have monetary rewards, that’s not the main reason why people spend their time for the project. Customers want to share, want to participate in the creation of products they like. When a brand gives the platform, it becomes the starting point. When there are brands that do not talk, they find us somebody willing to listen to their ideas, and ask their suggestions. That is the key motivator. How has been the response so far? In terms of submission of designs, ideas, comments, and so on? As on date, there are over 1600 idea submissions in textual, visual, and audio forms. The project has generated good traffic for us. We have created an exclusive microsite for the contest for the participants to submit their idea files in their own formats. |