Francesco will be heading over to the MRS New Media and Technology conference on the 19th November to join the conversation and present. Our Head of Web Research and Strategy will be discussing real time research and collaborative planning.
Research 3.0: real-time research and collaborative approaches for adaptive brand planning
Measuring and monitoring online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
Applying qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
Identifying the conversation hubs and the influencers across a wide range of channelss
Using crowd-sourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research,innovation and planning objectives
Building iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process
Also on the bill are speakers from the BBC, Orange, Coca-Cola and Danone so it should be a very insightful look into the future. To see the full line up and get some more info on the conference CLICK HERE
Top 5 tips for community management (May 07)
In a world restricted by budgets and processes, community management sticks out like a sore thumb. On a daily basis a community manager deals with something that frightens the life out of lots of people in business – unpredictability.
A guide to the Co-Creation, Crowd-sourcing Conundrum (May 18)
A common mistake of those new to open innovation & research is to confuse the practice of co-creation with that of crowdsourcing. As a result I thought I would give a quick guide to both, hopefully clearing up any confusion people might have.
Sherlock Holmes and the origins of co-creation (June 11) Innovative doesn’t necessarily meannew. It means new in a particular context, not ‘absolute new’. So if anyone ever pitched you co-creation as a new groovy ’social’ thingy, they were simply and utterly lying.
Cello Group takes majority stake in face (May 11)
So last Friday the very sensible people at Cello Group upped their stake in Face to 51% following an original 23% acquisition in December 2007.
Being part of the Cello family for the past 18 months has enabled Face to develop a strong international offering and has helped to establish us as the leading on-line qualitative research and co-creation agency.
I had some good feedback to some of my remarks as a panellist on the MRS Debate “Opportunities, threats and ambitions for market research”.A number of people came up to me afterwards to say they enjoyed my enthusiasm and optimism for the future of the industry. It was in mark contrast they said to the gloom and doom that we have been used to hearing and reading about in the last six months. It is a really exciting time to be involved with research for several important reasons.
Web 2.0 has given us new tools and new methodologies that weren’t there 5 years ago to help us get much closer to our customers and to stay close to them for continuous periods of time. We can achieve this by spending a lot less of our client’s money – critical during this economic down turn.
More consumers want to play and be given more responsibility in the research process. Their increasing desire to be listened to and involved more directly in what a brand does and says means that now more than ever there is a great opportunity to research with consumers rather than at them.
We’ve got the chance to be more ambitious not just in terms of uncovering deeper and better insights but also in turning those insights into great products that make money for our clients.
Co-creation means there is a big opportunity for researchers to become the real champions of consumer involvement, as well as the key drivers for it within an company. This will undoubtedly mean us taking on the responsibility of not just encouraging companies to open up to consumers but also generating new ideas, methodologies and tools to helping make this happen. By becoming the gatekeeper to co-creating and crowdsourcing with consumers – letting consumers really influence what a brand or company does – researchers will transform their role into a more strategic, interesting and valuable one.
As an afterthought I was not aware until recently that the quality of the exchanges we made during our session have prompted some of the nice people at MRS to shortlist us for the Special Contribution to ConferenceAward for your debate at Research 2009: The Annual Conference. It would be great to keep this thread going with anyone elses thoughts on other opportunities out there. Next month we will cover more on oppotunities, threats and ambitions.
At the MRS Conference last month I was invited to take part in the Ideas Rush an exercise where you have 5 minutes to talk about one idea and you are only allowed one slide to help you communicate it. I decided that my idea was going to start with a balloon and end with a massive bang. I asked the 70-80 delegates in the room to stand up; muster up as much energy as possible and then blow up their balloons with it. After they had tied their balloon I then instructed them to write 1% on it with a black marker pen before then placing the balloon on their seat.
The name of my idea (you guessed it) was the 1%ers (or “Adfluentials” as we call them at Face). As brands’ leading edge consumers they place an increasingly important role in the co-creation process. To find them brands need to start looking at consumers in a fundamentally different way – not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them.
The 1%ers are not passive respondents but active equals in your brand and they sit at the top of a brand relationship pyramid. They are:
1. Generally passionate about your category;
2. Passionate about your brand;
3. Have a set of skills that you could harness in co-creation
4. Have a large peer network
The key to getting the most out of your 1%ers is to worry less about how you are going to influence them in the hope that they will influence the rest of your potential customer base and worry more about how you are going to let them influence YOU.
If brands are prepared to let the 1%ers influence them, then the energy and the impact they can create for the brand could be as much if not more than the energy and the impact we created in the room by sitting on our balloons all at once. BANG!
Last week I gave a presentation to the MRS Youth Conference. It was a packed full agenda with Face represented on two fronts (Youth Programme Agenda) – the first of which, “Embracing Co-creation and collaboration approaches for generating creative ideas and driving new product development” I gave with Nadia from Lynx. The five key themes that came out of our session are summarised below and are already generating some positive interest ( WARC and Contagious).
1. Let youth influence you – worry less about how as a brand you are going to influence young people and worry more about how you are going to let them influence you and where the brand is going. This means taking a less top down and more bottom up approach to youth engagement and treating young consumers as equal participants in the brand marketing process.
2. Understand who your 1%ers are – “the adfluentials” as we call them of the brand – they are the people with the passion, skills and network to co-create with you – they will be prepared to jump through some serious hoops to be part of what you do and say. Invest in them.
3. The role of us the experts in this process is critical. We are the “co” in co-creation and set the context for getting the most out of our consumer’s creativity and passion.
4. To get the best out of your 1%ers creativity there needs to be a coherent structure/process which combines on-line and off-line methodologies to deliver much better results. The work we have done with Axe/Lynx and which Nadia shared with the Conference demonstrates how our co-creation process is achieving fantastic Bases results.
5. Be prepared to show leadership and ambition – you will need it to match the leadership and ambition shown by your co-creators – leadership not just in specific co-creation projects but also in the wider context. Co-creation can empower researchers to become the real champions of consumer involvement, as well as the key drivers for it within an company (Esomar Paper). This will undoubtedly mean taking on the responsibility of not just encouraging companies to open up to consumers but also generating new ideas, methodologies and tools to helping make this happen.
Unfortunately I was not able to end with the video because of technical problems but it is a good reminder of why we should not underestimate how far young consumers are prepared to go in sharing their creativity with us as part of the brand marketing or innovation process. In this example 4 students via Headbox created an advertisement for Doritos/Pepsico as part of their campaign “You make it, we play it” taking them 250 hours to make. Enjoy.
Last week Andrew and I were both presenting at the MRS Youth conference in Sadlers Wells London. Both of us had fantastic support from two of our clients – Beth from Coca-Cola and Nadia from Axe. I was up first in a bit of an early slot – 9.45, and Beth and I were talking about online communities; how to get the best out of them and why they delivered better results than traditional research, particularly in a youth context. Both Beth and I expressed a lot of passion in terms of why we did what we did. I particularly placed a lot of store in the point that true success in this kind of community comes from really encouraging participants to talk to one another in a natural, informal way and not just responding to the ‘moderator’ in a formal, mannered way.
This reminded me of days when I used to do lots of lots of focus groups and I would always try and have a chat with respondents ‘after’ the group was formally finished. It was amazing how quickly peoples voice, vocabulary and responses changed – i.e became more natural - once the group was officially over. This just shows how setting up formal environments can create formal responses and this is something we have tried to work against in the communities we run.
However, as a good challenge to that I was approached at the end by a couple of people from the BBC who had their own experiences of running a community online – designed to generate and create feedback on and ideas for BBC3 programs I believe. They came up and said that their principle in the past had been to keep people separate in order to avoid group effects and people just agreeing with one another and coalescing around one point of view. Well, we chewed the fat a bit about different ways of doing things, and it reminded me that one of the great things about the way we approach communities is that it does allow you to almost simultaneously do a lot of individual and communal work – a great benefit that should not be overlooked. At least the exchange proved that someone in the audience was listening which was great!
