Extra SciTechSpace: How HSNs New Crowdsourcing Project Could Shake Up Online Retail

Thursday, January 27, 2011

How HSNs New Crowdsourcing Project Could Shake Up Online Retail

Macala Wright Lee is the publisher of FashionablyMarketing.Me. Wright Lee is a retail consultant whose firm, Fashionably Digital, specializes in marketing consulting for fashion, luxury and beauty brands. You can follower her on Twitter at @FashMarketing.

Branded content has been a marketing trend that took the fashion retail industry by storm over the past year. Not to be outdone by their online competitors, television retailers like HSN, QVC and ShopNBC are using new and innovative multichannel marketing tactics in order to raise their profiles with the online audience.

Lea ding this new multichannel approach is HSN. The retailer is changing if not completely redefining the meaning of home shopping with its new online product distribution channels. In particular, its use of the iPad and YouTube as social marketing and educational tools is impressive. The company is one of the largest video content contributors to YouTube (their channels host a massive library of more than 60,000 videos) and is the first of the home shopping networks to release an interactive iPad application that acts as a companion to the television and mobile shopping experiences it creates for its customers.

However, even more intriguing than HSNs bold push into the mobile and social spheres is the companys recent gamble on fledgling consumer product entrepreneurs and its experimentation with crowdsourcing.

The leverage of these retailers have is nothing to sneeze at. Designers and cosmetics companies can sell more product (by volume) via these outlets in one hour than they can in one year in a department store. And now, as the marketing of apparel and beauty products bleeds into the consumer electronics world, the model is ripe for innovation.

Heres how HSN is changing the game for consumer products and developing a new product pipeline that goes all the way from ideation to production to marketing to sale.

A Crowdsourced Entry Point for Retail Entrepreneurs

Quirky Flowchart

HSN started to evolve its marketing strategy four years ago, when our current CEO Mindy Grossman felt it was more important for HSN to become a multichannel retailer that creates a curated shopping experience for its customers a! cross mu ltiple platforms, said HSN Vice President of Advanced Services John McDevitt. HSN had to have quality brands and designers with great stories; moreover, we had to have great storytellers to covey those stories to our customers. We dont just hire hosts, we bring in experts or the designers themselves to tell the stories.

As part of that evolution, HSN recently launched a partnership with Quirky, a social product development company that uses crowdsourcing to bring new products to life. Each week, it engages its online community to collaborate on all aspects of product design and development from ideation all the way to packaging. On January 29, Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman will be featured on HSN to sell the tech gadgets crowdsourced into creation by Quirkys community.

HSN is taking the partnership a step further by offering all would-be entrepreneurs the opportunity to submit their product ideas for consideration on HSNs product submission page, and Quirky is running co-branded product creation competition with HSN on its blog.

Ben [Kaufman] is an amazing storyteller, said Bill Brand, HSNs executive vice president of programming, of Quirkys founder and CEO. The partnership between the two companies was born after the two met. HSNs marketing strategy is based on pairing great storytellers with great products. Becoming an incubator for entrepreneurs with great stories was natural for us.

Essentially, with this partnership HSN has created an alternative to venture capital funding for entrepreneurs that are designing consumer prod! uct. Thi s also marks a win for crowdsourcing as a mainstream marketing tactic with offline audiences.