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.
