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Archive for the ‘Co-Creation’ Category

Building a Model for Customer Co-creation

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The team over at mycustomer.com recently asked Saul to give them a lowdown on co-creation and how it works in practice. He duly obliged and his efforts can be seen on the My Customer website here. His article covers the basics of co-creation, explores its value, as well as understanding how and why it works. Below are a few extracts:

Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organisation, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them in the hope that it will stick, clients get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. Ideas emerge, develop, are refined and validated in collaboration with your audience, in real time. No need to wait around for endless tests.

Why co-create?
Much of the growth of interest in co-creation as an approach and philosophy comes against a backdrop of dramatic changes in the communications landscape in recent years. The evolution of the internet has had an enormous impact on the way that businesses interact with their audiences, and vice versa. It is near-impossible to underestimate the extent to which social media has empowered consumers to voice their opinions, create and distribute their own content, and, as active stakeholders in the brands they consume, to set a new agenda for producer-consumer relationships, and in many ways the advent of co-creation is a corollary of these developments.

How?
There are, of course, different approaches to co-creation. The heart of the co-creation process we have adopted is typically a face-to-face workshop, but the ideal model involves a multi-staged approach to insight generation/opportunity shaping, ideation, validation and refinement. We often talk about reversing the research funnel, starting by consulting the crowd, moving on to work with defined online communities, then collaborating with an intimate group of co-creators.

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Co-creating With Oxford’s Finest.

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Stumbling into Paddington station at 6.30am is not usually something to get excited about. However, on this particular Friday morning there was a tinge of anticipation in the air. As I navigated myself around the station and checked the boards for the next train to Oxford I bumped into Francesco and Sharmila who would be accompanying me on this latest Face adventure.

After we all got heads in gear and boarded our train, it was laptops out time. We knew we had a expectant and well informed audience awaiting us so there was minimal room for error.

On the eventful 1 hour train journey we managed to make all required tweaks, run through our presentation, eat breakfast, listen to a new mix on Francesco’s iPhone and get told off for making too much noise in the carriage… nice.

Before we knew it though, we were there, Oxford, the home of academia, Morse, Radiohead and Martin Keown. After taking one step out of the train station we saw our final destination, the unmissable pale brick hub of future commerce that is Saïd Business School.

A couple of months earlier, Francesco had been approached by Professor Catherine Dolan, a lecturer at Saïd, and asked to take one of her MBA Customer Insights classes, focussing on co-creation and research communities. Within a flash Francesco accepted and plans were put into to place to adopt a quite experiential approach.

Since the topic was basically how to generate insights in a collaborative way, we decided the students should be experiencing first hand what it means to run, and be part of a research community and get a taste of face-to-face co-creation.

With this in mind, prior to the class we opened a 2-week research community for all the students to participate in. The class would be split into 8 groups with each group focussing on a different type of drink and being assigned their very own task.

The groups and tasks breakdown looked like this:

Group 1: Tea – Mobile Status Updates
Group 2: Ready-to-Drink cocktails – Idea Generation
Group 3: Wine – Video Diary
Group 4: Craft Beer – Poll
Group 5: Cider – Visual Lead Task
Group 6: Champagne – Discussion
Group 7: Energy Drinks – Debate
Group 8: Lager Beer – Diary

All of the students completed all of the tasks; they then took the results from their specific drink task and analyzed the results. Following this, they were asked to create a presentation that contained their drink analysis and also, their opinion on the pros and cons of online research communities. They would then present their findings during the Face lead lecture.

At the point of entering the beautifully spaced, Dixon & Jones designed building the online research community was already finished and the students had done a sterling job. We were greeted by Catherine and taken through to our lecture theatre. As a humble 2007 graduate of the University of East Anglia this was a little surreal to say the least. I joined Face in the same year I graduated, and when I walked into the lecture theatre about to present to Oxford students it really hit home both, how far Face and I had come over the last 3 years.

As the students entered it was time to present, Francesco was up first. He took the students on a journey through the world of empowered consumers, netnography, the evolution of the internet and the ways businesses and brands are looking to take advantage of the technological advances available to them. Following this we talked with the class about real-time research and how brands need to try stay in front of their consumers rather than chasing them.

Sharmila then took the students through how Face make sense of all the information Francesco had given them and what exactly we do to contain it within a process that is robust, manageable and keeps people at the core. She explained the pros & cons of crowdsourcing, online communities, Peer-2-Peer research and co-creation before revealing our approach and what makes it work so well for us.After a short break it was then the students themselves who took the floor and feedback what they had learned in the online research community.

Francesco (slides 1-38) and Sharmila’s (slides 39-end) presentation…

All the presentations we saw were fantastic, as expected, and the analysis very in-depth (bearing in mind they only had one task to work with each!). The students understanding of research communities was outstanding considering the small amount of time they had been exposed to the technique. Both the Face team and Catherine were very impressed with the outputs we received and we have taken a lot of them onboard as we continue to tweak and improve our research communities.

As the students settled back into their seats it was time for yours truly to step up. My presentation was a brief introduction into the world of online communities, with a more in-depth look at research communities and community management. I had to whizz through it due to time purposes but it was an excellent experience letting the great business minds of tomorrow know all about what I do. Hopefully they learnt something!

My Presentation to the class…

The final activity we did with the class was a practical exercise to show, on a very small scale, how co-creation works. Borrowing an exercise from Stanford University (that we edited a lil bit) we asked the students to work with their partners and design the perfect wallet.

Using co-creation techniques the teams of two worked together generating ideas, sharing insights, building on thoughts and ultimately designing a wallet that they would be proud to own. After all the groups had designed their wallets, it was voting time.

We asked all the students to vote for their 3 favourite wallet designs. Due to quality of the output this took quite a long time but by the end of the voting phase we were left with three clear winners. The designers of the most voted for wallets were than asked to take centre stage and pitch their idea to the rest of the class. All three groups performed admirably, detailing every aspect of their design and thought process. As the students took their peers through each wallet it really hit home how far co-creation can take you in such a small space of time.

With the wallet exercise at its conclusion and everyone exhausted after 3 hours of Face fun it was time to call it a day. We thanked the students for their hard work, both prior to and during the class, packed up our things and made our way back to London.

Living inside the Face bubble sometimes it becomes easy to forget that what we do is unique and cutting edge. Getting out of Midford Place and sharing our thoughts and methods with young people eager learn is always a brilliant experience, but presenting your passion at Oxford University really is next level.

On behalf of myself, Francesco, Sharmila and the whole of Face I would like to say a massive thanks to Catherine Dolan for giving us the opportunity, Marie Johnstone-Louis for her help and the whole class for letting us come and talk to you, I’m sure we’ll be meeting you again very soon… in the world of work!

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Cello Associate Conference: The Research Industry’s Ticking Timebomb

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I was invited to speak to the Cello Associate Conference last week at Somerset House – the first of what will be an annual gathering of Cello’s potential future stars. The main focus of my presentation was that as an industry we are sitting on a time bomb. I brought some drama to my session by asking 3 volunteers to diffuse three dummy time bombs (by cutting one of three wires) that were boxed and wrapped while the remaining audience counted them down in just ten seconds. Of course people realised they were not real but that the message behind them very much was.

Part of the reason we are sitting on a time bomb is the consumer landscape we operate in on behalf of our clients is changing very fast. We all know that Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. Or put another way, Simon Clift the ex CMO of Unilever said recently in an FT article “we (Unilever) are behind our customer and that is a very uncomfortable place for us to be”

Many of today’s brands and companies are struggling to keep up with their consumers. One of the main reasons for this is because of fast changing technology and what this allows consumers to do in terms of their interactions with each other, the brands, products, services they consume and the speed with which they are able to do so. A good example is the launch of the recent Xbox Kinect where the screen becomes the interface and the impact this has on TV participation is limitless. Similarly the introduction of flexible screen displays that are so supple, so thin and light you can carry them where ever you go while consuming almost zero power could only be a few years away. So, the big question from all of this, and the one we are constantly asking ourselves at Face, is what does this mean for the research industry, and what do we have to do to help our clients get and stay ahead of their consumers.

The answer to this question in its broadest sense is “Plus ca change c’est plus la meme chose” – or “the more things change the more they stay the same”. Change is the only constant and these are the five things we need to do in order to deliver on this mantra:-

1. Must be fast, agile and deliver insight in a continuous way
For the first time there are huge amounts of qualitative data about our customers that we can access in real time, on the web for free. Using our proprietary tool Pulsar we are able to observe and to listen to what consumers and customers are saying on the web about a particular brand/product/service. It is not just being able to see what is being said where, when and by whom but also being able to measure which conversations (and so who of your consumers) are having the most influence. This also helps us to identify your 1%ers.

2. Must adapt skills
The second is that as researchers we need to adapt our skills to meet the new demands… netnography – our ability to combine ethnographic research with the tools available on the web is a good example. As a business it also means we need to recruit different types of people with the skills that meet these new demands as well as train our current employees with these new skills.

3. Use technology to lead
We need to lead in the use of technology to help us become quicker and more responsive in the ways we gather insight about our clients’ consumers. And this does not mean replacing human analysis – to the contrary, the role of the researcher has become even more important than before because of the need to find real quality from the huge quantities of data that are out there – it is the combination of both on-line and off-line approaches that deliver deeper, richer and more meaningful insight.

4. Introduce new tools and methodologies
This means we have to keep challenging the way things are being done now and look to new and different methodologies that make the most of technology to help meet the challenges of the fast changing consumer landscape. At Face we have inverted the traditional research approach of starting with qualitative research and then going to quant by starting first with large numbers of consumers and then honing things down in a more qualitative way. To do this well it is vital to integrate on-line and off-line methodologies within that process because it produces more ideas of higher quality.

And this means changing the role of the consumer – treating them as active equals in this process; giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process separates Co-creation apart from more traditional research/marketing methods. As a result it is proving a more robust process than other approaches clients have been using.

5. We must keep innovating
Face’s journey started with the launch of Headbox, a year later we launched Mindbubble, six months after that we launched Pulsar and later this year there is more to come…

If we do all of the above then we will ensure that we continue to help our clients stay ahead of their consumers and we won’t be caught with the proverbial time bomb going off in our hands.

Check out the presentation that I gave at the Cello Annual Conference:

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New Rules of Consumer Engagement: Co-creation

Friday, June 25th, 2010

There was almost unanimous agreement at the FS Forum in St Paul De Vence over the challenges facing the Financial Services Industry. They were described in four words: trust, reputation, transparency and engagement. There was also serious acknowledgement that the consumer has a vital role in helping the major brands from the industry to meet these challenges. There was a sense too amongst some of the delegates that in the words of Simon Clift the recent CMO of Unilever they felt “behind the consumer” and that this is a very uncomfortable place for a brand or organisation to be.

Changing Consumer Landscape

This is to be expected as the consumer landscape is changing fast. It is common knowledge that the advent of Web 2.0 has given consumers the confidence and the ability to take more control of the relationship they have with brands. It has given rise to the term “empowered consumers”, a new breed of customer who have a strong belief not just in their own voice but also in their own creativity, ideas and self-expression. It is no longer about what your brand does to the consumer but what consumers are doing to and with your brand.

Impact on Financial Services Industry

This trend manifests itself in the Financial Services Sector in a number of ways. The first is that the empowered consumer of today sees openness as key to building trust and accountability with the brands they engage with. This is critical for banking brands where events from the last two years have seen trust and fairness eroded. This has been picked up by the FSA’s ‘fairness’ objectives where banks are now being tasked to provide fair products and deal with customers in a fair way. Secondly there is a drive to streamline consumer interactions and make customers lives easier by combining products. The social web will have a big impact on financial services marketing, sales and business communication processes with demand from consumers for new service designs and interfaces. This will enable consumers to draw upon a wider base of advice from places such as twitter, opinion aggregators and financial forums and will lead to real time customer service becoming a top differentiator. And finally customers are moving away from conventional advice channels (IFAs, banks) and moving more towards peer advice because social media has made this possible in ways that were not there before.

New Rules of Consumer Engagement

All of this calls for a new set of rules for consumer engagement and requires the industry to look outside its own category to the world of FMCG and Technology to find better ways of involving consumers in the research and innovation process. And they won’t have to look too far or too hard as the idea of co-creation – doing things with people not at people – has been embraced by the likes of Unilever and Nokia for a while. Co-creation takes consumer involvement to another level by bringing brands and consumers together on the same level and involves consumers at the beginning of the process rather than at midway or at the end. This can take place in on-line communities or offline in workshops or both. It is through our co-creation communities for young people namely Headbox and for women aged 25-50, namely Mindbubble that we have been helping Unilever to co-create a range of new products. The most exciting example has been our co-creation of Axe/Lynx’s 2010 variant in terms of both the product and also the fragrance – something that has never been done before – which was launched globally earlier this year.

Some important guiding principles

As with all new approaches though there are some significant lessons that we have learned along the way. The first is that when you are bringing leading edge consumers together with brands it is vital to have a coherent and well structured process that gets the best out of your combined creativity so that it delivers better outputs. The second is that within this structure it is important to have a mix of online and offline methodologies because they produce more ideas of better quality and are able to involve consumers more quickly in what you do. It is why we have inverted the traditional research approach, starting the process by gathering quality insight from thousands of consumers rather than just a few. Our proprietary tool Pulsar has allowed us to listen and to observe to what consumers are saying in real time on the web as well as measure the influence these conversations are having. Being able to combine qualitative and quantitative research in this way means we are able to help brands respond much more quickly to the speed, volume and quality of consumer interactions that are taking place with their brand, product or service. And finally the role of the consumer is critical; treating them as active participants in this process and giving them as much responsibility with direct involvement throughout the entire process. If the Finance Industry wants to stay ahead of their consumers and the fast changing landscape they occupy then they would be wise to adopt the principles and philosophy of co-creation.

Face @ Financial Services Forum 2010

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Innovating For Emerging Markets & How Co-creation Can Help

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

According to the IMF emerging market economies will contribute 70% of the worlds economic growth by 2014. In fact Brazil, India ,China & Russia (BRIC) represent the vast majority of this growth while in comparison the G7 nations including US, UK, Japan, Germany, Canada, France & Italy will only achieve 13%. In fact when you look at data for most categories it is clear that compared to the developed world emerging markets are experiencing massive growth. For example Euromonitor data shows that while the soft drinks market is declining by 10% in Western Europe India is seeing growth rates of 15% and Argentina is growing by a massive 25%.

Clearly there are big opportunities for brands to take advantage of this growing consumer demand by launching existing and new products – but of course it is not that easy.

Take Kelloggs as an example who in 90’s launched Cornflakes into the 900m Indian consumer market with a modest ambition of gaining 2% share which if achieved would be bigger than their existing US sales. However it bombed badly Cornflakes achieved just £7 million worth of sales in 3 years. Kelloggs failed to understand that in India breakfast is a religion! It is freshly prepared in the morning predominantly hot and spicy, plus milk in India is always boiled and consumed hot which has the effect of making your Cornflakes soggy and horrible to eat.

Pampers also had a difficult start when they launched in China in the late 90’s with a cheap plastic version of their US product. Again this giant brand was arrogant and failed to understand that Chinese parents brought up their children differently. They potty train them by 6 months and that they care so much about softness of their skin they do not put their children in nappies at all preferring to use a kaidangku… see below…

From our experience working in these markets it is crucial that marketeers discard their western lens and avoid the temptation to see npd process as just an extension or replication of their current business. Put simply you need to invest in developing deep consumer and cultural understanding.

This is why co-creation with consumers is so useful when entering an emerging market.

Cultural Immersion - by working directly with consumers in emerging markets to develop npd concepts global marketeers quickly understand the values and motivations that drive purchasing decisions

Language & Codes - when marketeers start to bring early product concepts to life with consumers it is incredibly useful in uncovering the tone and cultural codes that will appeal and just as importantly those that will turn off consumers

Brand Positioning – co-creation with consumers is a very effective way of exploring what role a brand can play in a new market helping to answer key questions: what new products can it accommodate? can this brand work across socioeconomic groups? do we need to localise the brand in anyway?

Product Stretch – innovating with local target market consumers enables marketeers to understand how well existing products will resonate in local markets and can help tweak and refine features and packaging to optimise them for the new market

For more information on co-creation and emerging markets take a look at these related articles:

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What Is Co-creation & Why Do It?

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Earlier this month Face Research Director Saul attended The Market Insight Forum where he led a workshop session on Co-creation with 50 senior researchers. Take a look at his keynote presentation What Is Co-creation & Why Do It?

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Who is Leading Who in the Breakthrough to Find a New Marketing Model?

Friday, May 28th, 2010

When Face set out on its journey to change the world of research and innovation 4 years ago we did so on the belief that the rise of the empowered consumer was going to change the media landscape forever. And we have been proved right.

We recognised that brands needed to find new ways to deal with the same old research and innovation problems. We pioneered the co-creation approach based on a new philosophy of doing things with consumers rather than at them.

This required a fundamental shift in clients research approach, moving them away from thinking of consumers as passive respondents and seeing them more as active participants in the research and innovation process. In this sense we would like to think that we lead our industry to a place where the approach of co-creation has now become widely accepted. But we would not have got there if it were not for the perspicacity of a brave client – a certain Ana Medeiros who was the Global Research Manager of Lynx/Axe at the time. It is fair to say that we both lead each other to a new horizon where the consumer was placed firmly at the centre of a new marketing model.

As I predicted last September in my blog – Co-Creation Will Create a New Breed of Agency, the debate around new industry approaches has moved beyond research and innovation into brand planning and communications. The world of advertising has been slow to react. It is why we were one of the founding members of the London Co-Creation Hub.

It is a debate that has been picked up by the outgoing Marketing Chief of Unilever, Simon Clift. In April he warned of a “lost generation” of brand managers who do not understand the web and social networks. In his final interview before retiring he said he believed public relations agencies were best placed to profit from the rise of Facebook and Twitter, as traditional advertising agencies struggle to adapt to the digital world.

Clift - Brands Need To Catch Up With Consumers

It is not just PR agencies that are moving into the space traditionally occupied by advertising agencies it is everyone, from research to experiential companies; they are all in on the act. And the reason for this is we have all recognized that the consumer is at the heart of the new marketing model not the brand. As Clift remarked “We are all learning. Unilever is ahead of much of the competition but behind consumers, which for marketers is not a comfortable place to be.”

He is absolutely right. A lot of us are behind consumers and it makes for a very bumpy ride – they are the ones leading the media industry to a new approach, one that is based on doing things WITH not AT. We have a duty both as clients and agencies to the consumer who are, after all, our ultimate customers to develop a new marketing approach that meets their needs more appropriately.

This is not going to be easy but we have to start now. As Clift says it “requires a cultural change for companies like Unilever. We have to listen to genuine customer concerns. Companies aren’t set up for that”.

The worry is they need to be and fast.

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New Things Are Afoot At Face!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Well I’ve been a bit quiet of late on the blogging front. But its been for all the right reasons!

We’ve been really busy in the last month or so doing lots of new things, having lots of new experiences and extending our methodology to increasingly diverse briefs and markets.

In last month we’ve done two really exciting projects that I feel are worth sharing and demonstrate our fervent belief in our methodology.

First we’ve been off to India and Australia to work on a ground breaking global brand re-positioning project, for which we pioneered a co-creative approach, delivering a new brand footprint and equity creative brief.

While most traditional agencies and clients would employ a safe, traditional focus group methodology or appoint a big, corporate consultancy, we stayed true to what makes Face Face – intimate, direct and equal interaction between clients and consumers, running workshops in Delhi and Sydney.

We spent 2 days in each market working through a series of co-creative exercises designed to explode and explore 2 potential positionings and allow the consumers to really show us what they want to see and how they want to interact and relate with the brand concerned.

The result is a final brand positioning that is completely consumer centred, exploded, explored and refined, already validated and ratified, and a creative brief that is significantly tighter and more informed than ever before. Less testing required, less risk and uncertainty, and a fuller, earlier understanding of the parameters and possibilities inherent in it.

Secondly, on a similar brief for another client, we have further adapted our methodology to create a more mobile option for co-creation, extending it out of the tried and tested workshop environment and into a more modular, in home environment.

By developing and tailoring our co-creative exercises to work in a more traditional focus group sample structure and setting we can better accommodate problems where regional difference and range is a core consideration for answering the strategic problem at hand. It is also a great option for audiences or subjects where working in a large group may be inappropriate or uncomfortable.

Co-creation is increasingly becoming one of those marketing buzzwords that any old agency is bolting on to their “offering” and saying they can offer, but it takes the years of experience Face has working directly with clients and consumers to be able to truly stretch the methodology and exploit the incredible potential in it.

Here’s to another year of projects that allow us to push the boundaries…. it’s so much more interesting that way!

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Co-Creation – More Than Just Idea Generation

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Over the course of my time working in research, and specifically co-creative research and innovation, it has become apparent that we often focus solely on the development of ideas in co-creation. This makes sense. Clients are looking for better ideas and concepts from these types of sessions, at the end of the day. However, it is often easy to forget that these sessions provide a hot bed of insight.

I was recently facilitating a co-creative innovation workshop where this became startlingly apparent. This session provided one of the few opportunities for the client team to interact directly with their customer base. While they gained a clutch of interesting ideas, they left also feeling they knew so much more about their customer base than they did before.

Whilst it can be argued that many clients can get this as readily from attending discussion groups, there is often more that can be gained from the unique situation of a co-creation session.

For a start, moments of insight may not happen in the way you expect them. You’re not just asking people questions in a room, geared towards delivering insight. Instead, gaining insight can happen in a way that is much more akin to osmosis. Just by getting up close and personal to consumers in a room for one or two days can give you more than you ever anticipated by way of insight.

This is why, whenever we do co-creative sessions, we increasingly challenge clients to find out more about their customers, just by hanging out with them, or giving them specific tasks. This can be in the form of briefing them to find out things about people in the room during the lunch break, or just spending their coffee breaks together, rather than instinctively looking to check messages.

At the end of the day, co-creation is about delivering better ideas, but it’s also about finding out more about the people who really matter – your customers.

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Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd …And Back Again – Crowdsourcing for New Product Development

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.

But how does it work in the research & innovation world?

‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.

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Digital Innovation for the Arts

Monday, April 26th, 2010

This morning we took part in the latest Digital Salon and Surgery at Farringdon’s Free Word Centre to talk about digital innovation for arts brands and organizations, discussing how they are innovating to meet contemporary digital challenges.

It was a very interesting session with a packed panel of six speakers discussing the topic from various angles and presenting some great case studies like the upcoming Chromaroma Oyster Card game (below) and the recent RSC Twitter production “Such Tweet Sorrow” supported by the 4iP fund or ‘NT Live’, a new initiative from the National Theatre which enables live performances to be broadcast onto cinema screens across the UK and worldwide, as well as the NMC Music Map and the cutting-edge ‘PureDyne’ project, an Open Source Linux operating system and multimedia toolbox maintained by the Goto10 Collective.

We talked about our open innovation approach and adaptive brand planning model, how Arts organizations could benefit from real-time research, crowd-sourcing and co-creation and what this all means from a broader cultural perspective. I guess one of the most fascinating implications of taking this approach to the arts space is that it makes the progressive switch from creation to emergence models quite blatant. Understanding the radical change in the role of experts/curators and artists into the cultural ecosystem and understanding what open processes mean in terms of cultural innovation (leading/reacting, educating the audience/learning from the audience, creating new markets/feeding into existing ones) are key questions for the Arts but are totally relevant for the FMCG brands and the technology innovation ecosystem too. So I guess a Creation vs Emergence post is on its way!

For now, thanks again to Arts Council England, IT4Arts, Open Mute and Digital Salon for having us today, it was fun!

Chromaroma Visualisations from Mudlark on Vimeo.

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We’re In Research Magazine…

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

We have a nice juicy feature in April’s edition of Research Magazine! Entitled The Sweet Smell of Success the piece is a case study about our work with Axe/Lynx on Twist, the fragrance that changes. Written by Face Managing Director Job Muscroft the article explains the inner workings of the Twist project and the importance of involving consumers in the marketing process.

It can be found on page 32 & 33 of this months Research Magazine.

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Face in Business Week – Co-Creation: Not Just Another Focus Group

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

“To launch Twist, a new men’s fragrance in its global Axe brand, Unilever turned to a preapproved crowd of eager young amateurs for help.

In July 2008, Unilever executives convened 16 regular young men and women from around the world at a meeting in New York. Why? To tap them for ideas for a new global fragrance for Axe, a brand of men’s body spray, antiperspirant, and shower gel. The company had previously experimented with consumer-driven product development for local launches, but never for one on such a large scale…” READ MORE

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Philip Nominated for MRS Award!

Monday, March 29th, 2010

We’re delighted to announce that Face Research Director Philip McNaughton has been nominated for the Best Paper Award @ the 2010 MRS Research Awards.

Philip’s paper ‘Co-Creating Insights’ was put together in collaboration with Coca-Cola’s Beth Corte Real. Documenting the findings and learning’s from our recent community, co-creation and insight work with Coca-Cola the paper was also converted into a presentation and showcased at the recent Market Research Conference 2010.

You can check out the presentation HERE

Congratulations Philip, we’re all very proud of you!

Related Links:

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Co-Creating Co-Creation @ the MRS Conference 2010!

Friday, March 26th, 2010

On Wednesday this week I had the great opportunity of co-presenting with Beth from Coca-Cola and a handful of other agencies operating in the co-creation space at the MRS conference in a shared session called Big Brand Co-Creation. Sharing the stage with us were Hyve & Nivea and Sense Worldwide & Discovery. It was a great session that we all saw as a chance to collectively raise the profile of Co-Creation as a discipline and show the extent to which it has come of age as a discipline within the industry. Each of us was charged with showing a slightly different dimension of co-creation, highlighting the scope and variety of the ways it could be used to achieve great things with big brands.

The emphasis of our paper was on taking co-creative principles of collaboration, real time, speed & open-ended thinking into a traditional insight focused brief, highlighting how co-creation was not just about bringing new ideas into a business, or a party trick for something fun and low risk, but could actually be applied at the heart of the insight function, aimed at building a complete foundation of insight. You can see the paper here….

Co-Creating Insights – Face/Coca-Cola Mrs Conference Annual Conference 2010

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As part of that session we were all charged with coming up with our own definitions of co-creation, and to tell our own story about the roots of co-creation, and to start to talk about its future, and to imagine its future together. This got me thinking about the best way to visualise the story of co-creation, and I came up with idea of a tree, where the roots were some of the drivers & trends behind the disciples, the trunk was the core principles and practices and the branches all of the potential different applications.

So over the next few months, I am going to start building the tree, piece by piece with a series of pieces aimed at showing first the roots, then the trunk and finally the branches, hopefully with a view to creating a complete picture of my take on co-creation.

Watch this space for more…

Finally just to say thanks to all at MRS for organizing the session, and great to see co-creation continuing to rise up the agenda. Long may it continue!

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Co-Create London – Initial Results

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

London is one of the biggest cities in the world; it is a massive player in the world’s finance, fashion, business, party, retail and social media industries. It’s a place where dreams can be made and literally anything can happen! But even though London has an unlistable amount of good points and amazing opportunities, it’s not perfect.

So on 24 February 2010, to compliment the launch of The Hub, we also unveiled a new initiative called ‘Co-Create London’. This is aimed at addressing the Capital’s main issues and annoyances by listening to the people who know the City best – the general public. Whether they’ve lived In London their whole life or just passed through, Co-Create London is asking people to answer a very simple question – ‘What Would You Do To make London A Better Place?’.

In just 3 weeks we’ve had loads of buzz worldwide; people have approached us from other countries asking about rolling it out in their cities and we have been covered across all the London blogs.

To date we’ve received over 300 ideas and 3000 votes on a vast range of topics including transport, crime, poverty, education and the environment. A couple of weeks ago we ran a Co-Creation workshop bringing together Londoners who have contributed to the Cocreatelondon.com website with experts to turn their ideas into positive and real solutions.

The aim is to continue the process of idea generation through crowdsourcing and co-creation workshops as well as to spend time honing concepts into well thought through solutions that can be implemented. These will go to a public online vote, with the idea that the solutions obtaining the most votes presented to London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The outputs from the workshop, which were presented on Thursday at the London Co-Creation Hub launch, can be seen below.

BeSpoke Lanes – Cycle Paths running along side railway lines

Cycling in London is very dangerous and a lot of people are put off the pedal as they are scared of cycling on the streets. Railway lines provide direct access to the city and some of them have enough room to incorporate a cycle lane running alongside them.

BeSpoke Lanes work as cycling highways running alongside railway lines. By paying a small amount via your Oyster card at the beginning of your journey you can access the BeSpoke cycling lane. This money goes towards the upkeep of the cycle lanes via adopt-a-mile groups. The adopt-a-mile groups look after a certain section of the cycle path ensuring its upkeep and keeping the area clean and tidy.

Youth clubs and local artists can also get involved and make the BeSpoke Lanes look great, there is also potential for advertising space. It will rejuvenate the rail side and provide a safe route for people to access the London from its outer limits.

Enterpride – Turning disused properties & spaces into accessible cultural & retail hubs

London is full of disused and run down space especially post recession, why not allow these spaces to be occupied by start up businesses, artists, creative individuals and educational workshops.

Enterpride will facilitate the transaction between landlords willing to volunteer their property & Londoners wanting to use the space. Those occupying vacant spaces will have access to the property until they can afford to rent it, or an established business is willing to pay for the space. If users of the Enterpride scheme have their current space bought by an established company they will be assigned a new one. The only cost Enterpride occupants will have to pay are the business rates which are minimal.

Enterpride will not only give new businesses, initiatives and educational workshops the opportunity to have their own retail, gallery or exhibition space but it will also rejuvenate neglected areas. This in turn will encourage established businesses, residents and consumers to explore new places and bring money to otherwise ignored areas.

Swap Stories – A Book Swap System for London Underground

Public transport is boring; Swap Stories makes your commute more interesting and lets your imagination go on its own journey!

Swap Stories is a book swap system initially starting in tube stations to encourage Londoners to read more. You can get involved by making a small Oyster card deposit via the Swap Stories book dispenser. You can then pick a book of your choice or get a random book chosen by the dispenser. Swap Stories relies on trust and honesty, you can only take a book if you bring one to swap.

The scheme will be run in conjunction with libraries, charity shops and 2nd hand bookshops. Volunteers will vet, check and add the books back into the system. There will also be opportunities for publishers to sponsor stations and areas. Theme days or weeks (Charles Darwin week, Romance week etc) could take place and short, one journey‚ stories could also be written by famous authors or commuters and added into the Swap Stories system.

To check out all the Co-Create London ideas and submit your own visit www.cocreatelondon.com

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Co-Create London – Top 10 Ideas So Far!

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Co-Create London has been live for exactly 10 days and thus far we are ecstatic about the results! As this is being written we have received 249 ideas from 191 people and a staggering 2,219 votes have been cast!!!

We thought we would let you know what’s been going on over at CoCreateLondon.com, starting with the Top 10 ideas on the site so far as voted for by Co-Create London users.

1) Free Wi-Fi hotspots in public spaces across town – 127 votes
Free WiFi access seems to be something that Londoners want to see in the city. However there has been some backlash to this with other users asking – how would WiFi make London a better place?

2) Open library-style book kiosks/ book swap system in Tube stations so Londoners are never without reading material on the underground! – 63 votes
Bringing some culture & entertainment to the transport system is something that has been a running theme on the site. This idea has been the pick of the bunch with a strong backing from Co-Create London users.

3) Oyster Card becomes Oyster London card – pay for anything in London up to the value of 20GBP – 58 votes
A few users have been quick to say that this idea has already been explored by TFL but didn’t go ahead due to financial regulation complications. However, making it only for small payments adds in a new angle and would encourage spending.

Could it be used for other purchases beside travel?

4) Tube Tunnels as giant immersive flipbooks. We all travel miles & miles underground everyday through black tunnels. The Tube carriages have all got amazing windows to look outside of the train at… well, nothing. Wouldn’t it be nice if the walls of the tunnels were covered in series of pictures that vary gradually from one to the next, so that when the trains goes through the tunnel they get animated? – 56 votes
A new model for artists, creative types, brands and advertisers to get involved with. Would brighten up millions of Londoners journey to work but is it feasible?

5) Simply by putting air conditioning on the tubes would improve life in London during the Summer 100% – 56 votes
Boris has introduced air conditioning on the circle line and, as some Co-Creators have noted, there have been cut backs on energy use in stations to reduce heat but is it even possible for there to be a totally cool tube?

6) Annual Open Labs Day…Similar to Open House Weekend, but celebrates our city’s vast and under-appreciated science culture. The public get to question real scientists in working labs, and explore London’s scientific history (Darwin, Newton, Hooke, Faraday, Franklin, Jenner, Davy, Maxwell…) through open days at places like the Royal Society, Royal Institution etc. – 54 Votes
Exposing and helping the public understand the great scientific significance and heritage London has is a great idea! Could be amazing with the right marketing behind it, but will it get backing from Boris?

Boris has unveiled air-conditioned tubes on the circle line but can he do this for the whole of the tube system??

7) A swimming lane system on Oxford Street, people who want to walk slowly and browse you walk on the inside of the pavement (nearest the shops), people who have got to go places and are in a hurry walk on the outside (nearest the road). This would stop all the pushing, shoving, barging, dodging, frustration, pain etc that walking on Oxford Street causes!! – 49 votes
The human congestion on Oxford Street causes frustration for thousands. The new crossing at Oxford Circus has been a success so why not go one step further and create a manageable, easy and beneficial system for the rest of the street?

8 ) Turn Empty Shops in to spaces for performance, places to learn a new skill and mini-markets for creative local residents to sell their wares. – 46 votes
It is no secret that there are lots of empty retail spaces in London, especially after the recession. Why not do something positive with this free space? Giving it back to the community could help regenerate areas and encourage potential buyers.

9) Instead of the Oyster machines making the same beeping noise when you go through, each one has a different musical note, such as a piano key. – 45 votes
Would a series of these small, fun and quirky ideas cheer up commuters and make travelling in the city more fun? The users on the Co-Create London site seem to think so!

Outdoor dancing, big in China, could it be introduced in London???

10) Encourage more frequent outdoor dancing – 412votes
China and Japan have been doing it for years, it is hard to imagine Londoners getting involved though. Would be amazing if the right scheme was set up!

Throughout this week we will be running through some of our favourite ideas and releasing more information about the journey Co-Create London is about to go on!

What Would You Do To Make London A Better Place?

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The Creatives Role in Co-Creation

Friday, March 5th, 2010

In the spirit of co-creation and the core value of openness that comes with it I welcome wholeheartedly Lucian Camp’s thoughts regarding The Co-creation Hub. However I would like to counter some of them as well as try to enlighten him on the benefits co-creation brings to creativity and to the marketing process as a whole so that he will bring his experience and talent to bear on what we are trying to achieve.

He is right to highlight some of the very real concerns many people in the creative community have regarding co-creation. Indeed it is easy to look upon it as a process that makes creative people redundant and worse, fails to recognise the high esteem with which clients hold creativity and creative departments. But this is to misunderstand the nature of co-creativity. It’s not about dinosaurs versus trailblazers, it’s about a new way to find truly innovative and compelling creative solutions to clients’ problems and by the very nature of creative people we should all be open to new processes and approaches.

The good news is that as a Hub we have been engaging in this debate for a while and generally speaking we have been able to carry both people internally and externally with us on our journey. And there are three important reasons for this. (more…)

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Face: A Co-Created History – Part 3

Friday, March 5th, 2010

In the later stages of 2009 it was becoming clearer and clearer that research, innovation and planning should and could work together in a tighter environment. A continuous process needed to be adopted, as opposed to one based on silos; and consumers should sit in the heart of this process.

This idea was the seed for our hugely popular and controversial presentation, Do Brands Really Need Agencies. Within a packed room at London’s Groucho Club, brand managers and agency people ascended to listen to what this new adaptive approach could do for the industry. One of the agencies taking part in the conversation at the Groucho Club was our office mates and advertising gurus, Farm!

Farm agreed that the industry needed a shake up and that for brands and agencies to really understand the needs and wants of their consumers they would need to work with them, not at them.

Do Brands Need Agencies? | Face Forum, Nov 09

In November 2009 we worked closely with Farm to help Skinny Cow develop ideas and create their latest advertising campaign – ‘Oh Yes You Can’. The collaboration took place online within Mindbubble and face-to-face with members of the brand team, Farm creatives and Mindbubble ladies all under the guidance of our robust methodology.

After the experience of collaborating and co-creating with Farm, we started to talk about how this partnership could become a permanent yet agile business model. Here the idea for the Co-Creation Hub was born and a new way of doing things began to take shape.

After hours of meetings, arguments, laughter and much deliberation The Co-Creation Hub London was brought to life. The Hub is a collective of organisations, academics and individuals who passionately believe in doing things ‘with’ people rather than ‘at’ people.

The Founding Members of The Co-Creation Hub, London

Alongside Face the other founding members of the Co-Creation Hub London are Farm, the advertising agency, which has co-created communications for Nestle’s Skinny Cow; Opticomm, the media planning agency; Touch of Mojo, the brand design agency; and thrudigital, the social media development agency. And, they are actively looking for organisations and individuals from different fields that share their way of thinking, to get involved and help develop the co-creation movement.

Andrew Needham, founding partner of Face, as well as group managing partner of Tangible Group London, a core division of Cello Group Plc, is one of the key instigators of The Hub:

“The Co-creation Hub – London recognises that social media isn’t simply another channel; it has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with brands. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous model of marketing – one that is based on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them. We call it Adaptive Brand Planning. It is a model that will ultimately be better placed in helping our clients deal with the advent of social brands”

The Hub’s belief that great ideas can come from anywhere means there are huge untapped resources out there that can flourish in a co-creative environment. The Hub is looking for organisations and individuals from as diverse a field as possible who share the same co-creation driven way of thinking, whether that’s a manufacturer, an artist, a school or even a government.

The launch of the Hub coincides with the release of Axe Twist, the first 100% co-created product. In July 2008 we co-created with 16 core Axe consumers from the US & the UK to create a new fragrance based around ‘freshness’. The workshop, which took place in New York, was a huge success and saw the idea behind the product (a fragrance that changes from day to night), the name and the actual fragrance itself co-created. Twist hit the shelves in late 2009 and early signs are that it is performing well in the market.

The Co-Creation Hub is the next chapter in Face’s collaborative history and is set to be as innovative, fresh, open and disruptive as the last one.

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