Perspectives on crowdsourcing : Can experiences in the food & beverage industry be transferred to the fashion industry?

Abstract: Crowdsourcing can today be found in practically any industry, but the extent to which it is used differ widely. A report from last year, published by the crowdsourcing platform eYeka (eYeka 2015b), shows that the fashion industry is among the industries using crowdsourcing the least. Brands that are more inclined to using crowdsourcing are those working with fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). That includes many brands from the food & beverage industry such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Danone etc. This study builds on this knowledge to explore the use of crowdsourcing in the food & beverage industry to find out if that experience can be used in the fashion industry where it is not widely used today. To identify different approaches of crowdsourcing used in the food & beverage industry 78 crowdsourcing campaigns from 9 brand during a two years period (2014-2015) was analysed. The analysis resulted in the identification of 3 main approaches: crowdsourcing as ideation, customer engagement and crowdsourcing for creation/production. More importantly this study comes to the conclusion that the way crowdsourcing is used by the brands in the food & beverage industry is not formed in such a way that it is exclusive to the industry in question. There are no immediate boundaries for the fashion industry to adopt the same way of working. If the fashion industry would like to follow the trend in food & beverage industry they should focus more on the creative ideation side of crowdsourcing and less on the creation, and most of all on marketing. However, there are also other areas they can learn from like Business Development.