Just recently the Classic Limited Edition 2017 of the Swiss Army Knife designed on jovoto hit the market – for the sixth year in a row. Working with Victorinox on one particular creative task every year has not only become an interesting ritual internally, it has also allowed us to directly compare results and discover how Victorinox has increased sales of their 130-year-old swiss army knife by 70% through cocreating on jovoto.
“The Limited Edition version of the small Swiss pocket knife is the most successful and bestselling knife collection to date.” – Andreas Michaelis, Global Head of Sales & Marketing, Victorinox AG
The second time jovoto organized the project for Victorinox, we believed that the increase in performance was a result from the overall community growth and improvements of our model over time. But after taking a closer look in the third year, we learned there was more to it: The relationships a brand forms with members of our community over time improve a project’s performance significantly.
The yearly project became a ritual not only for our team but also for many members of our community. Our creatives look forward to the next round as an inspiring challenge but also as a good way to apply learnings from the previous edition. The investment for each individual creative to participate becomes lower and lower after gaining experience in previous years. This not only increases participation quantity, but most importantly submission quality.
For Victorinox, the existing relationship with hundreds of creatives increases to pay off each round. The first year we organized the challenge to create a limited design edition for the Swiss Army Classic Knife, roughly 1 000 designs were submitted. The following year, Victorinox received 30% more submissions, and, most importantly, the quality increased and has continued to increase every year.
The key learnings have been:
- Cooperating with external communities over a longer period of time creates relationships which significantly impact results in a positive way.
- Tacit knowledge and existing experience can be leveraged over time which increases the quality of results.
- The transaction costs for jovoto as well as clients for organizing a project decreases over time, so maximizing ROI.
We are happy to see that more and more of our clients are taking notice of these lessons learned and are beginning to reflect on how working with our community needs to be structured and organized over a longer period of time. Are you leveraging your community investments to their full potential?