The partnership between the leading crowdfunding platform Indiegogo and Coca-Cola to launch the premium water brand Valser suggests crowdfunding can foster agile innovation by helping big companies to adopt a startup culture.
The story, reported by the trade title Marketing Week, recaps that using Indiegogo as the launch platform for their brand new product allowed the US-based beverages company to
cut down the time it takes
to launch a new product.
Moreover,
The campaign gave people a feeling of discovering something new and it felt more authentic. Investors also got the opportunity to purchase bottles of Valser and provide feedback on its taste, brand proposition and price creating loyalty and a two-way conversation from the start.
Vice-president Dave Preston said:
We saw this as a unique launch platform but also a way to get a clear read on what consumers want.
The experiment is not the first of its genre, Marketing Week recalls, reporting that other big players like Procter & Gamble and Heineken had leveraged crowdfunding to test and launch products.
Marketing Week’s author Molly Fleming concludes:
Innovation will be key to growth going forward, meaning companies must think faster, better and more originally than ever before. Clearly the fail fast model won’t work if brands continue to take years to develop products – it needs to be done quickly and cheaply to maximise the chances of success and minimise the damage of failure, which is why the crowdfunding approach is so effective.
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Oliver* 
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