FreshNetworks Blog

Oxfam crowdsources new slogan

Oxfam is looking for a new slogan. They want a poster for their Be Humankind campaign and rather than commissioning an agency to do this, they’re asking us to do it for them.

The concept is simple - you can write a slogan directly onto a billboard on their site, and then submit this as an idea. The best 14 ideas will be displayed on digital billboards around London for a day each over a two week period from next Monday.

Letting people write your copy for you can be a difficult decision for brands. Most spend a lot of time and effort working on their branding, the tone of language they use and even testing slogans. But Oxfam are not worried about this. Speaking in a Guardian article earlier this week, Nick Fulcher, Brand Manager at Oxfam, says that:

We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t feel comfortable that we’d get some great stuff

Let’s just hope they do.

So what can we learn from this?

This is a great example of something we have written about a fair bit recently: co-creation. In fact, this is an example of what we call Community product design.

The interesting aspect of this campaign is that much of the discussion it has generated this week is about how difficult it can be to write slogans and there is much interest in what the content of the slogans will be and how this will fit with the brand. For me the real issue here is not about the slogans but about the process. In fact I don’t think this campaign is really about generating slogans at all, and the success of the words that actually make it onto the billboard next week will not be judged by the words themselves.

This is actually a great example of how to engage and involve people beyond their normal brand activities. The real purpose of this campaign is to find new ways of engaging new people in the  brand and, in Oxfam’s case, the issue. The use of social media in this way will generate a lot of word-of-mouth as people talk about it online and offline (an example of which being this post). People will be prompted to find out more about Oxfam and about the Be Humankind campaign long before the slogans appear on those billboards across London.

There is a real benefit to brands of innovating in this way and of using social media to co-create. We use innovation tools a lot in the online communities we build for brands at FreshNetworks, and the results can always be useful. The real engagement built, the word-of-mouth for the brand and of course the very ideas themselves. I’ll be looking out for the Oxfam slogans next week, but I suspect the success of this campaign is already known.

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Some more reading

• You can change the world with Oxfam