Last week I headed over to Brussels to present at the Esomar Insights 2011 conference. Beth from Coca-Cola joined me on stage as we took the audience through the ongoing community work we have been doing. The emphasis of the conference was on Shopper insight, so the focus of the presentation, which you can find below, is on how online communities can help you get closer to people’s in store behaviour.
Enjoy!
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….
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!
At Face we don’t like standing still; partly because we are always looking to improve and do things better, and partly because as the world changes we need to change with it. 2010 will be no different, and we are bursting with new ideas for products, communities & projects. Here are our predictions about the research & innovation business in 2010, and a sneak preview of some of the things Face will be up to.
1. 2010 the year when research goes truly mobile as smart phones become commonplace and research on the go starts to catch up
Face will be developing a smart phone application that allows us to conduct research more effectively on the go and in real time
2. The year when the research industry embraces & empowers consumers as researchers, to truly reach the parts that researchers cannot reach – peer2peer research shows what the industry looks like turned inside out.
Through our communities Headbox & Mindbubble we are training consumers to act as researchers within their own peer groups going undercover and asking the questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask.
3. The year when Tech Research & Innovation begins to learn from FMCG research in terms of innovation and product development. Why? Because the consumer is now the subject & not the object of technology.
Face is launching our own tech community in 2010, aimed at engaging tech leaders in insight and innovation work
4. The year that social media & the web as a source of insight is finally taken seriously. Everyone wakes up to the fact that the greatest source of data is around us all the time – it’s just a case of harnessing it. No more excuses.
Face launches 2 new real time research products – Pulsar Snapshot & Pulsar Tracker – designed to monitor and analyse conversations and interactions around brands & categories in real time.
5. Co-creation & communities go east – increased confidence in the methodologies takes them firmly out of the west and into Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia & South Pacific
Face is launching community platforms & co-creation projects in India & Australia, building on existing platforms in China, Russia, Thailand, Philippines & Indonesia.
6. Death by Powerpoint becomes death of Powerpoint, slowly, slowly. One day soon. We won’t be crying.
Face will be emphasizing visual clarity & simplicity in terms of outputs and making more and more of our debriefs / output material available online as an ongoing treasure trove for clients
7. The year that the industry embraces communities in their ongoing insight, innovation & planning cycles, enabling them to work in the real world as their brands become as social as the people consuming them are!
Face has developed an adaptive brand planning process that helps Insight, Planners & Marketing people to keep their brand planning dynamic, organic and always on!
8. The year of the rebirth of insight. Researchers realise that processes like Co-Creation, Communities & Crowd-sourcing are not just there to play with, but are serious methods of getting better result, especially in the day in day out job of getting clients closer to their customers.
Face is doubling the size of its insight teams and putting actionable insight at the heart of everything we do
So, 2010, some big challenges & quite a journey ahead but a truly exciting time for us and the industry as a whole. Look forward to going on that journey with you.
After years of enjoying being briefed by clients on their insight & innovation needs we at Face finally got to turn the tables yesterday and set a room full of senior client insight people one BIG challenge. At 3.30pm Face interrupted a Unilever Global CMI conference and sent delegates scurrying out into the streets of Windsor and crawling the web to get some hands on insights in the world of Oral Care. It was all just for fun, but it was great to see a group of senior people from Unilever not only interviewing each other & getting out on the street but also fully engaging with YouTube, Twitter, a variety of blogs and engaging with content produced by our own Mind-bubble women. There were a few cheeky calls to dentists, some great mother & child interviews on the streets and the shelves of local Boots and Tesco Express were stripped of toothpaste. All that was missing in the room was having consumers there in the room to work with us and get directly and actively involved in the process, but as we had plenty of mums and dads in the room, there was plenty of home truths available!
It all just showed how much can be achieved by a focused group of people in a short space of time, and how much resource there is avaible all of the time for us as research community to tap into. We can’t reveal too much about any of the outcomes, but it generated a lot of energy, enthusiasm and a huge amount of competitiveness. The final output from each team was a 2 minute film capturing their insights and the journey they went on to get there. By the time you read this the winning team will have already been announced and with Oscar season upon us soon, the likes of Cameron, Clooney & Eastwood might be starting to feel a bit anxious about their chances this year.
For those of you who were at the session and took part in making the films, you can go and watch them all by clicking on the following link <http://www.facegroup.com/global-cmi-conference>. You will need the password you have been sent by email!
Thanks to all who took part for their commitment and making it such a fun session.
Obama upstaged by a Nose!
As Sean, Lucy & I headed in Chicago for a co-creation project last week there wasn’t much sign of Mr President in his home town; but it didn’t take long for him to rear his head in the workshop. During the introductions, Daniel, a true all American guy told us that he had come face to face with the new president following the election night celebrations. Now that was pretty exciting, and Daniel was still buzzing over it a year later.
But that excitement was superceeded by the excitement he felt in coming face to face in the workshop with Ann Gottlieb, Fragrance Queen & creator of CK One, who was there in the workshop to stimulate and engage with a bunch of straight up Chicago guys talking about deodorans & fragrances. You wouldn’t expect Daniel to know or even care what Ann had to say about fragrance (or vice versa), but something in the experience really got him excited (“wow, I never thought I would be in the room with an actual real life ‘nose’”) and got the whole workshop going! Such are the joys of co-creation, and an important lesson learnt; that creativity and creation is really & truly stimulated by the mingling & collaboration of many different people and perspectives – often completely different in background, experience & perspective.
There is no one guaranteed recipe for co-created innovation success, but how about this for starters. Take one Daniel (all American guy), add one Ann (world-renowned fragrance expert), mix together thoroughly, sprinkle in some brand magic and serve over Chicago ice. Just perfect. Who needs Mr Obama?
Next up on my travels – San Francisco, say tuned!!
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