What is the best way to find out what the future brings? Invite someone to show you! An effective tactic for a company that makes consumer products to determine what a target audience wants from them in the future is to ask them to help design the product that best fulfills their needs and desires. The most productive means to make this happen is to create an online design contest that offers up an attention grabbing group of prizes and career opportunities.

As the world evolves expectations change; specifically in terms of consumer products. The cool gadgets once thought of as futuristic are now a part of everyday life and require customer feedback in order to continue to improve their products and better integrate them into the common lifestyles. Throughout the past few years design contests have become a popular means of obtaining customer insights amongst the business and academic communities, not to mention the general public. Majority of these contests are hosted online and employ the same type of concept—create and submit a design of what the next product should look like and how it should function in order to win great prizes. By hosting online, contest administrators can use the online contest site to increase traffic to their corporate site where there is often a free download available to entice the prospective customer and drive them to point of sale. In addition, staying virtual allows companies to develop a database of potential users to later send e-blasts, newsletters, or special offers.

Not only do design contests improve website traffic, bring leads to their site who wouldn’t otherwise visit and allow companies to continue to market to leads, but they also drive viral marketing—a key component to any successful contest. By including a “tell a friend” button or link, users can share their interest in the contest, brand and product with friends and family. Some contests even award prizes to contest participants that tell the most friends, or give away prizes to those who enter the contest to vote for submitted designs. As for the design submitters, the benefits are tremendous because the “buzz” is created around their work could lead to career opportunities in the future.

Some marketers might ask why they have to create a design contest in order to take advantage of all these benefits when they can administer a simple sweepstakes or raffle. The answer is in the design submissions. Upon contest completion the company has legal ownership of the submissions to use for future brainstorming sessions. The features of the new designs submitted are what the contestants thought would be a great addition to the next generation of the product. Often functions added to the design of a technology product will be similar from contestant-to-contestant. Results like this tell the company that the overlapped function is important to their current and or prospective target market. This information ties in with the measurability of the contest. When all is said and done, the marketing company and internal employee(s) responsible for the contest have new design concepts, answers to prospective questions, and increased traffic to the company site. With this valuable information a case study is often built and used for prospective opportunities. These are all deliverables there for them to evaluate and follow up on for future contests.

We recommend targeting design students for these types of contests. Students are amongst the lowest income bracket of the population as they are spending thousands of dollars per year to become educated in their field of interest. In the academic world they look very highly upon contests sponsored by the corporate world because as they say “our youth is our future”. Design contests are encouraging and confidence-building, especially to aspiring designers hungry for feedback and ultimately exposure. The design contest concept is similar because incentive is built by the opportunity to be a part of the next generation product.

So who’s doing it? New players to internationally renowned brands like Ford, Nike and Adidas. Gennum Corporation recently ended an online design contest which was created and administered by us, The Henderson Robb Group. The contest encouraged international design students to enter what they thought the next generation nXZEN Bluetooth headset should look like to win large monetary prizes and international recognition. Check out www.nxzen.com/designcontest for more details. For other design contests we developed, go to www.hendersonrobb.com/casestudies.html.

Our design contests are professionally created to assist a company in creating brand awareness, capturing a new market, or rejuvenate their brand and product amongst their existing customers. Contact brittanyg@hendersonrobb.com today to learn how you can get started in creating your own design contest.