Based in London and New York we operate all over the connected world. Our team consists of researchers, planners and creative technologists as well as thousands of networked consumers and experts within our co-creation communities.
We are all having a pint or two down the pub and talking about:
Creating online fan bases…How to and how NOT to
A lot has changed since the Romans set up the first tabernae, where people used to get together to gossip, exchange experiences and mainly…well, get pissed.
But even though nowadays, when 1 in 8 couples getting married are meeting online, where social media is more popular than porn, and where Facebook would be the 4th largest country in the world, people still get together down the pub. So come on down.
When?
Thursday 8th July, starting 6:30pm
The evening will be relaxed and informal.
Pre-paid bar, so help yourself! As long as you can get home
Introductory talk by Face, the co-creation planning agency
A number of 2-3 minute presentations throughout the evening on successful experiences in cultivating and creating fan bases online…as well as some colossal screw-ups to learn from
Vox pops and snippets of insight from individuals
Come and go however you please
No fancy-pants jargon
Where?
Bell and Compass
Next to Charring Cross station. In the ‘downstairs bit’.
Bell and Compass website
See you there!
PS, everyone is invited to talk. Just let us know as soon as you can in advance, as we don’t have many slots left.
Last week Face descended on The Groucho Club to run our latest Face Forum. The focus this time around was 9 Lives; specifically, the lives of young British people aged 16-24. The late teen/young adult demographic is one that is particularly significant for many brands. However, this is a demographic which is shrinking over time. As a result, the need to understand and engage this demographic is more pressing than ever.
So, how did we go about finding out about the lives of this demographic? We commissioned nine people, aged 16-24 to make films about what their lives are like in the year 2010. In addition, we also ran an online community with our Headboxers, and posed the question: “If you had to leave yourself a message for yourself in 10 years time, to remind you what it feels like to be your age in 2010, what would it be??”. From both, we discovered a wealth of information about this demographic, and it’s clear that, whilst many things about being young stay the same, a lot of other things are also changing.
It proved an incredibly enjoyable and thought provoking night, which gave many people a lot of food for thought. On a side note, this was Face’s first foray in using Prezi. However, it most definitely won’t be the last. Whilst still a work in progress, it is clear that a lot of potential lies in using Prezi as a presentation medium.
Check out the Prezi for the night without video clips below, if you would like to see the full presentation and check out all the media from the 9 Lives project please head over to out 9 Lives site – Click Here
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:
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 big companies 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 using 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.
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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