CRM and Social Media: Will Companies in Other Industries Go as Far and Offer Their Customers "To Pick the Team"?

As companies are adopting strategies and initiatives that enable increased customer feedback to ensure that customer expectations are met – or exceeded – it appears that one initiative is taking customer interaction and impact of customers’ opinions on a company’s strategy one level further.

Myfootballclub.co.uk – an online initiative with a £35 ($70) membership fee – was launched in April 2007 with the intention of purchasing a football (soccer) club in England and have members directly impact the running of the club through online voting and discussions. Early 2008 myfootballclub.co.uk had raised enough money and decided to purchase Ebbsfleet United FC, a team in the fifth league in England. The goal is to make Ebbsfleet United FC more successful and move it upwards in the rankings and leagues of English football.

Considering that the core of this initiative is the strong relationships between a sports club and its customers, this initiative falls under the umbrella of CRM – but it is extending the definition of CRM as it enables customers to directly impact the running of day-to-day business for a sports club. The initiative also differs from traditional fan ownership initiatives and shareholder situations by the fact that customers will invest in the football club with no chance nor any expectations of any financial return (nor any loss liability).

Another recent trend, crowd sourcing, has some similarities to the myfootballclub.co.uk initiative as it allows for a large base of voices to impact a company’s strategy but myfootballclub.co.uk significantly differs from crowd sourcing by for example directly short term effects on the running of the business. In essence myfootballclub.co.uk is a big step towards truly democratizing decisions a company takes. Members of myfootballclub.co.uk will be able to vote on player sales and purchases, they will be able to vote for the starting line up (and hence take that responsibility away from the team coach/manager) and they will even get to decide if money in the club should be spend on facility improvements or for example buying a strong new player?

The interesting question is if we will see similar initiatives in other industries? There are many signs of increased interaction between customers and companies and a new type of companies are even built upon principles of strong collaboration with customers, where customers more or less replace R&D or marketing departments (e.g. threadless.com). Although customers in other industries might want to get more in return than just knowing they partly own a company, would a small or medium sized company in another industry be able to adopt a similar strategy to that which Ebbsfleet United FC has done? Will we in the future see a company offer its customers to vote on product offerings, pricing levels and other initiatives – and having management be obligated to follow the “voice of the crowd”. Would companies be willing to go this far in order to develop stronger ties or unique partnerships with their customers as a competitive move? There are signs of it out there and trends like crowd sourcing are heading in a similar direction but would, could or should other industries go as far as to follow what is currently happening within the world of sports?