So, owner and master chocolatier Arno Backes gave 300 strangers $5 each to tell him what sort of chocolate they wanted this year. He used the responses to create his product range, at what is the busiest and most profitable time of the year for him.

Backes may have been running his European-style chocolate business for seven years, but didn’t know if customers would go for his new range of funky Easter eggs covered in colourful dots, or preferred the classic marbled eggs. Perhaps an Easter bunny? Would they buy both? And what would they spend?

“I wanted brutally honest answers about what sort of chocolate people want to buy before we started creating our Easter range.

“We were going down the path of creating classic, marbled Easter eggs and some modern styles, and I didn’t want to run out of people’s favourites. We also wanted to know if bunnies or eggs were more popular,” Backes said.

He fired his question out to 300 strangers online, and had responses in two hours.

Strangers told him they wanted to spend between $20 and $40 on chocolates for a loved one, and preferred eggs over bunnies.

Asking an honest question of strangers was far better than distributing the usual feedback forms among customers, he says.

“The concept of asking people who aren’t your customers what they want to buy this Easter is far more valuable than asking people who already shop with you.”

So he asked a new Melbourne crowdsourcing platform, AnswerCrowd for its help. It cost him $1500, and saved him making more bunnies than he probably could have sold.

AnswerCrowd founder and CEO Daniel Martin says the model gives businesses the ability to receive valuable, unadulterated feedback from the crowd.
The platform takes crowd sourcing to the next level by connecting people with questions, enabling decision makers to step outside the boardroom to brainstorm with everyday people.

“Crowdsourcing is not new – customer feedback has been around for centuries. But the rise of social media has given consumers a real voice, and businesses now realise that the ‘crowd’ is powerful, intelligent, useful and immediate,” Martin says.

It means a business can ask the crowd a simple open-ended question, targeting any demographic. They can ask follow-on questions once they’ve learnt something from the first question.

AnswerCrowd launched a few months ago. Martin says there’s a pipeline of businesses wanting to ask questions. He’s approached everyone from ANZ Bank to Bunnings about his faster-style of market research.

He says businesses are making big decisions based on the responses to their questions.

“This is a contemporary way for businesses to get to know consumer thinking. By asking the public for opinions on their products, services and marketing, it can help them predict market trends, create more effective advertising and improve their decision-making,” Martin says.

Once a question has been fired, each member of AnswerCrowd is notified by email that a question is waiting to be answered. They then click through to provide their response and press submit.

Respondents can’t read each other’s answers. There are 7200 people in the crowd in various demographics, and crowd numbers are growing every week.

Businesses pay $5 per crowd member for up to 50 answers and $10 per crowd member per answer for answers from fewer than 50 crowd members.

Crowd members are paid between $1 and $2 for each answer they provide, and are rewarded dollar for dollar with a pre-paid Visa card, a Coles Myer gift card or a Woolworths gift card.

“Mostly, crowd members give us much more information than we need. They simply want to have their voice heard,” Martin says.