Innovative doesn’t necessarily mean new. 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.

Long before user-generated content, the prosumer, crowdsourcing, co-creation, Lego collaborative brand Factory, Philips creative consumer, Axe co-creation adventures and our user-generated Tango, consumers had already been heavily involved in shaping the present and the future of their beloved brands.

And when I say long before, I really mean it. As Scott Brown narrates in his recent Wired feature, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill Sherlock Holmes just ten years after its birth, an army of mourning fans wearing black armbands took to the streets of London to show him how disappointed they were. But their protest didn’t end up in an ante-litteram flash mob. They knew exactly what their brand should have been doing so they started co-creating it. They started writing Sherlock Holmes adventures themselves, giving birth to the first co-created product: fan-fiction.

Fanfiction, as Wikipedia puts it, is a “broadly-defined term used to describe stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.”

From unauthorized published sequels to Don Quixote, to parodies and revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; from fan-written stories based on Jane Austen’s characters to the explosion of modern fan-fiction popularized via the Star Trek fandom in the 60s, fan-fiction has progressively invaded magazines since the 20s and has been blossoming online for 20 years thanks to newsgroups, mailing lists, forums and blogs which made its distribution easier, faster and massive.

So, in a way, co-creation started with fan-fiction and one of the main reasons for this is that storylines and fictional characters are the most flexible brands you can work on. And all you need is a pretty traditional set of tools to influence and shape/co-create them.

So what’s the difference with today’s brand-consumer co-creation? Well, mostly the types of brand that are involved in the game and the tools we use to make it work. Web 2.0 made 100 years old fandom mechanisms smoother, more commercial, easily replicable and paved the way for making them into commodities. And one of the outputs of this ‘commoditization’ of fandom interactivity is certainly the brand-consumer co-creation we do today.

However, the mechanisms of today’s brand-consumer relationship are pretty much still the same of the good old character-fan engagement and that’s why looking at fan-fiction can provide us with a number of useful indications about how the brand-consumer relationship works and about how can we recreate the spontaneous fan-based co-creation process ‘artificially’.

To start with, fan interactivity tells us that co-creation happens in various ways and implies various degrees of collaboration, creativity and cross-influence between brands and consumers. Amongst these various forms of fan interactivity, Ivan Askwith identified five patterns of engagement that can easily apply to the brand-consumer relationship:

1) identification
fandom is a quick way for fans to express things about themselves and their identity. As you can say “I am a fan of x” you’re saying something rich and distinctive about yourself very quickly. It happens the same with brands, so your role is to facilitate and foster this identification as a first level of co-creation with your consumers.

2) mastery
passionate fans know everything about your brand and your products so they are a natural vehicle for delivering the full meaning and symbolic universe behind your brand. That’s why your consumers should be the first to know all the details about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Engage them in networks of brand insiders and they will become your most efficient advocates.

3) production
media companies and media brands look more and more for ways to involve their audiences into the actual production of content. Bring your consumers on board when it comes to innovate, provide them with the right tools to play with your brand and re-use it in creative ways, help them make the brand a part of their daily lives.

4) participation
consumers want to be part of the brand building strategies. ARGs for example have been an excellent way for turning a movie franchise into an interactive storytelling adventure where the fans become the main characters of the plot and help the story progress. (check out the Dark Knight viral campaign as an example) When we translate this for more traditional products, giving consumer a leading role in planning and rolling out activation strategies is one of the best way of engaging with them.

5) appropriation
once your product is out into the world, you don’t really own it anymore. Well, you still actually own it, but you don’t get to decide exactly how it’s going to be used and what are the meanings that will be associated to it. Remix and alterations are key to appropriation and endorsement, so make sure your brand is flexible enough to support it.

From this list of engagement patterns it’s quite clear then that there’s more to co-creation than just new product development. There are so many levels of contribution and ways to co-create that the types of output can be fundamentally endless. Co-creation has been mainly used for innovation and NPD so far but the there’s a huge potential in areas like activation and brand strategy, and we’ve just begun to scrape the surface of it.

In the participatory culture and media ecosystem in which we live, spontaneous co-creation is happening in many forms, anyway, whether you plan it or not, in legitimate and illegitimate ways. So, better embrace it and guide it, than ignore it or block to try and own it.

 As Alan Moore uses to say, “let them create it and they will embrace it”.