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’re very proud to have had our work with Expedia mentioned by Andrew Warner – Expedia’s senior marketing director, customer marketing organisation, in Marketing Magazine. We quote:
As part of Warner’s overhaul of the marketing department, he held co-creation sessions with consumers and employees, which he says were vital to see the brand from a range of angles. ‘Brands and advertising shouldn’t just be run out of the marketing department; it’s too important.’
Warner is confident that this approach has helped Expedia create a campaign that is true both to the business ethos and its consumers. ‘One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to hire an expensive ad agency that builds up a proposition, which the company then can’t live up to in the eyes of consumers,’ he says.
Face worked with Ogilvy and Expedia to explore the best ways of expressing the new big idea proposed for Expedia’s new positioning.
A co-creative approach was utilised, bringing together consumers, the Face team and Expedia and Ogilvy stakeholders in a one-day session in London, to co-create what the key messages and tonality should be at the heart of how this positioning was to be communicated.
Ideas developed in this workshop were then evaluated and optimised in a series of discussion groups in London, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam and Milan. This also presented a key opportunity to understand how communication ideas would need to be developed to ensure they resonated on a pan-European level.
We presented our learnings from co-creating the new global positioning for Mortein last year, and aimed to dispel some of the tired old myths of co-creation by demonstrating how we had used our process to circumvent the traditional barriers cited about working creatively with consumers.
You can view our presentation above but here are some of our main points:
True creative, disruptive thinking that works on a brand (rather than product level) can just as easily be done by consumers as “experts” – it’s about giving them the right tools and frameworks.
By keeping workshop design and tasks abstract and non linear, by never explicitly exposing the destination, you can free consumers up to let go and be truly creative. And by building in divergence and inspiring disruption in design you can increase the richness of output and collateral with which to build your brand.
By mimicking the creative tools and techniques taught to professionals, and removing the focus from problem solving to game playing and story telling you can keep outputs full of meaning and texture rather than rational logic.
But finally, when it comes to brand building, story telling and myth-making really lie at the heart of this. And as such rather than try and ignore cultural norms, key to building a truly resonant brand story is capitalising on that folk narrative and symbolism and re-mixing it in a newly relevant way.
Face’s rapid growth continues with the opening of our new US office this summer. The new research team will be based in New York and headed up by Philip McNaughton. The New York office will service our growing number of US & South America based clients.
Andrew Needham, CEO of Face, says: “This move represents the growing recognition of the rewards that embracing the empowered consumer in the research and innovation process can bring and the importance technology is playing in getting closer to consumers.”
Our new US office is the first in a series of Face offices that will be opening in the next few years as part of our plan to offer a new breed of research and innovation services on a global basis.
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