As part of my continuing look at crowdsourcing as a creative strategy, I’d like to explore how brands could benefit by taking a slightly different perspective and focus on the deeper, longer terms benefits of open source in lieu of or in conjunction with crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing in some ways is a mere tactic. It’s something that a campaign is built around. This can work well as a one-off, but as a long-term, sustainable creative model I think brands will find it lacking. Open source on the other hand, sets the stage for ongoing, longer term engagement with a much broader audience.

Open source gives us things like Tweetdeck, Facebook apps and the iTunes App store. Open source is an ongoing engagement with a community that has a passion for your brand. Part of the contract for this engagement is that you are giving people a certain amount of license. You are providing a platform, tools or other brand assets and in return these people are extending your brand, making it more useful to a larger audience.

When it comes to matter such as these, I like to get other opinions, and no one is better at parsing the distinctions and exploring the nuances than Mike Arauz of Undercurrent. When I brought up the notion of open source and crowdsource, here’s what he had to say:

“Crowdsourcing and Open Sourcing have an interesting relationship. I would hesitate, however, to put them at opposite ends of the same spectrum.

The first thing that comes to mind is Linux. Arguably the first significant open source effort, which then became a success story in crowdsourcing the production of a competitive operating system. In this case, open sourcing enabled crowdsourcing.

Rather than two different tools or options, I see open sourcing and crowdsourcing as two complimentary techniques for producing creative and innovative solutions, ideas, products, services, software, etc.

That said, I completely agree with you that brands would be well served by paying more attention to the opportunities that open sourcing offers. I think that it aligns with my general approach to branding for digital culture which I wrote about in this post. Brands need to empower and enable people to do things with the brand that the brand never imagined. And this is different than inviting the public to work on a specific goal or project. If you’ve got something that people care about, that people are passionate about, and feel invested in, then they can be trusted to create new branded experiences on your behalf that are suited to their own personal desires and needs.”

Pimp my sneaker

A couple recent examples from the world of apparel jump out at me as great examples of crowdsourcing. Earlier this year, Champion gave fans of the brand an opportunity to create their own hoodies via the Hoodie Remix site. Champion gave people the opportunity to design their own styles and the winning design is now being sold online and in select retail outlets. You can see the evolution: First Nike let’s you create your own personal gear for you to buy for yourself with Nike iD, then Champion let’s you create for others. Now Keds has taken it one step further with Keds Collective, letting all sorts of would be shoe designers create custom shoes for sale.

Great article by Christina Binkley in the Wall Street Journal touches on all three of these examples.

In addition to savvy marketing, brands can also reap the benefits of this open source approach from an R&D perspective. Champion received 189,000 designs for their program. From that I’m sure they’ve learned what patterns and colors were hot, emerging or passing from the collective interest. They plan further Hoodie Remixes and will no doubt continue to glean more insights about the people who buy their products and care about their brand.