Crowdsourcing, you say? How about crowdselling?

It's partially my obsession with food and partially my obsession with product innovation that makes today's topic so fascinating.

Every ounce of me applauds the team behind the new burger concept due to open its doors in Midtown Manhattan next month.

The concept will be called 4Food.

Part of its brilliance comes from its simplicity. A burger joint that starts with high quality patty options - choices include lamb, fish, turkey, veggie and the standard beef variety, plus a couple others. The burgers have a hole in the middle so they can easily be loaded with a "scoop" topping, also of the customer's choice. There's a bunch of other choices to be made as well including bun, cheese, sides, veggies and so on.

The notion of customizing one's own burger is admittedly not all that revolutionary. But the next part is.

Servers take orders on iPads. Likewise, customers can place their own order using their own iPads (in advance or in store). Customers give their burger creation a name - whatever name they want, presumably. And it gets better from there..

Here's the part I'm calling "crowdselling". That's a made up term for now, I think. The customized creations, complete their given names, are fed electronically to a jumbo electronic screen that greets people as they walk in. Others will enter the store, see the creations built by others and elect to order one of those or build their own.

Still, there is more.

The creator will actually be compensated for "selling" his or her burger creation - 25 cents per burger creation sold. Customer-creators are thereby incentivized to "market" their burgers via twitter, facebook, iPad to the jumbo screen, word of mouth, whatever they like. The quarter is given in the form of store credit.

It's a great big cycle that not only involves asking people what they want and letting them have what they want, but essentially bringing them on as part of the marketing / sales team.

Time will tell whether this is a concept sustainable beyond a single unit and / or whether its just too complicated for its own good. For now it's just a cool glimpse into the way social media can be harnessed to leverage the strength of consumers in truly building a brand.

ON STRATEGY.