Customer co-creation includes community interaction

Co-creation has traditionally been understood as customers and vendors creating and or designing products together.    Usually co-creation implies that a customer can “build their own” product at a vendor’s website.  The customer samples available combinations based on their preferences.  The result is a highly personalized and unique version of the product.

Co-creation is the progression of online shopping behavior.  Basic ecommerce has been defined by allowing customers to search or browse an online catalog of products.  As user demand for better shopping experiences increases, the natural next step in ecommerce has been enabling customers to not only choose a version of your product, but to visually configure a version of your product.   We recently highlighted co-creation as a trend to watch in VentureBeat.

What is co-creation?

However, recent research by Treehouse Logic suggests that co-creation is not simply the union of customer creativity and a vendor’s mass customization tools.   We asked over 200 online shoppers “If you were to ‘build-your-own’ product online, what web features would help in your decision making process?”

The “a-ha moment” from our research is that customers now expect a third component in co-creation; community interaction.    Of course customer reviews and ratings have been status quo in standard online shopping for some time now.  But, in the context of “creative online shopping,” users want not only customer recommendations and ratings, but the ability to see creative product designs that have been built by other customers, as well as creative suggestions from the vendor.

In this context, “community” includes both other customers and the vendor themselves.  86% of respondents said that recommendations from the vendor or experts are important.   Clearly, if customers are shopping at a “create your own” website, they expect guidance from the shop owner themselves.   The shopper expects advice from the vendor, as if they were discussing a custom suit with a tailor.   The customer wants to design their own suit, but with the guidance and suggestions of the craftsman himself.

% of respondents who rank these features as important

Likewise, we want to share our own creations with our friends and family, which is why customization tools must support sharing each unique creation via email, Twitter or Facebook.    Sharing is a two way street.

It makes sense that shoppers would want to see social activity as they are customizing.   They will want to see what others are building; most recent products built, best sellers, crowd-sourced recommendations, Facebook “likes”, and “staff picks” from the vendor.  When we are in the midst of the creative process, we don’t want to lock ourselves in a room and dream up a product by ourselves, we want to get inspired by a community of people that may be more creative than ourselves, ie the vendor and other creative customers.