How would you describe your role?

My role….  Part planner, part creator, part trainer, part performer, part researcher. To do co-creation successfully you need to be many things at any one time. It’s not the same as running a focus group – you still have the insight objectives but actually your role is to create an immersive, inspiring way of getting to those objectives. If I could make a rule in co-creation that you are not allowed to ask direct questions (as you do in more traditional methodologies) I would.

How did you become a marketing research co-creator? What’s your background?

I started in market research for a publishing company so I have an appreciation of product development, I then spent some time as a planner for a couple of above the line and digital agencies giving me an appreciation of the creative process, ideation and strategy. I came to agency side qual research to be closer to consumers again, and this is a great place to get an appreciation for managing clients and stakeholders, and deadlines (both of which are big parts of co-creation).

Any tips for how to stand out from the competition when you’re trying to get a job in co-creation?

Like any qual research, co-creation is about a balance of people skills (being able to engage people, being able to elicit information and shape conversations) and analytical skills (being able to judge information, get behind the words to the meaning, find the underlying assumptions and unstated beliefs). However it’s the creative and performance bits that are different from traditional research – anything that can demonstrate you think about problems differently and design creative solutions to those problems, and any skills you can demonstrate in performance will set you apart.

What are the top three rules you have to follow as a co-creator in market research?

1. Make it fun – create the right environment, gamify the session, set the right atmosphere
2. Make it creative – design exercises that use different parts of the brain, do things that feel challenging or strange, think laterally about how to get to your objectives
3. Make it physical – vary the pace, get people moving about, change the scenery

Where do you see your role going in the next five years? What’s the future for marketing research co-creation?

It’s worth noting that increasingly I think co-creation will be adopted as a core part of the qual armoury (if it isn’t already) so really this question doesn’t make sense – additionally I’m not just co-creator, I’m an Insight and Strategy specialist.  Co-creativity is a philosophy rather than a tool – so in fact for us, I see principles of co-creativity (creating immersive environments, building long term mutual relationships between clients and consumers, sharing the responsibility for success) governing all the research activities we do.

Increasingly though I think it’s going to be about how you layer co-creation with other tools and data sources – whether that is social media insight, crowdsourcing or social media monitoring.

What’s the biggest mistake you most often see in co-creation? What’s so bad about it?

Just treating it like a souped-up focus group – albeit with clients in the room asking the questions as well.  This is just lazy and not harnessing the full power of the approach – you won’t get better ideas or insight from just doing the same thing in a bigger room.

Learn more about our co-creation process here.

]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/research-job-opportunities-face-is-hiring.html http://www.facegroup.com/research-job-opportunities-face-is-hiring.html#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:32:39 +0000 admin http://www.facegroup.com/?p=8918 That is right! So if you want to join a team of innovative researchers, please send your c.v. or resume to team@facegroup.com. Please include the reference code and then your name in the subject heading of your email.

UK Roles we are currently looking to fill in our London office are:

• Community/Panel Research Director  – Code UK-CRD

We are looking for a strong researcher who can pioneer the use of Community Panel research with our growing list of clients. With at least 7 years experience  (ideally quant and qual mix) they must be able to help pitch and oversee the implementation of ongoing Community/Panel research projects

• Qualitative Research Manager – Code UK-QRM

We are looking for a qualitative research manager with at least 4 years experience to join our excellent qualitative team. They must be strong project managers with an appetite for working on global projects using a mix of on and off line methodologies.

• Social Media Analyst – Code UK-SMA

We are looking for a quantitative researcher with an unhealthy passion for social media to join our fast growing social media research team.  They must have at least one years experience dealing with quantitative data and have the ability to uncover and communicate insights.

US Roles we are currently looking to fill in our Manhattan office are:

• Qualitative Research Manager – Code US-QRM

We are looking for a qualitative research manager with at least 3 years experience of working with CPG clients to join our growing team in New York. They must be strong project managers with an appetite for working on projects from start to finish using a mix of on and off line methodologies.

• Qualitative Research Director – Code US-QRD

We are looking for a qualitative research director with at least 7 years experience to join our growing team in New York. They must have experience of running and developing client accounts, building and managing team and delivering projects from pitching to final debrief. Experience of working with CPG clients and using a mix of on and off line methodologies would be beneficial.

]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/expedia-praises-faces-co-creative-approach.html http://www.facegroup.com/expedia-praises-faces-co-creative-approach.html#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:12:58 +0000 Chris http://www.facegroup.com/?p=8284

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.

]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/face-at-mrs-brand-conference.html http://www.facegroup.com/face-at-mrs-brand-conference.html#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:46:17 +0000 Esther http://www.facegroup.com/?p=8210 MRS Brand Research Conference

View more presentations from Face.

Our very own Saul Parker and Esther Garland went along to the MRS Brand Research Conference in Central London a couple of weeks ago to talk about co-creating a global brand positioning.

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.

click for a closer look at @marionren‘s great illustration

It is two days before everyone arrives at Glastonbury and time for our Glasto Goes Social predictions! Based on social media buzz around festival fashion we reckon you will see more than a few photos of people dressed like this!

Where This Came From

We began by looking at overall trends – what were the key items people were talking about taking to Glasto? Wellies came through loud and clear – but that was a bit too obvious. We dug deeper, analysing clothing mentions to understand keywords and developments over time. We could see exactly who was saying what, too. Though some fashion PRs may have been pushing silver croc-print Hunters, the black variety picked up a stronger grass-roots following.

Let’s Break It Down

Starting with the head, straw hats are a key element of people’s festival wardrobes, as befits a trip out into the Somerset countryside. So far, so Vogue, but people are also talking about customising and custom-printing t-shirts for their groups, a grassroots trend, not one from the fashion blogs.

As for the feet, people will be wearing wellies, the biggest trend of all clothing items with 600 mentions. They’re a huge 23% of all festival fashion conversations. This isn’t surprising, so let’s get a bit more specific: The most popular style will be black Hunter wellies, with a bit of a buzz around those with a shiny textured finish. Add a poncho prediction to the wellies, and this demonstrates social media’s ability to pick up the defining features of an event – the fear that Glasto will be a mudbath!

Surprisingly, Hunters was the only brand name to feature strongly in social media discussion. They can claim to be the sole fashion brand with close ties to the iconic Glastonbury. Perhaps this is a vacuum just waiting to be filled?

But rain is not dictating fashion. Buzz was much higher around shorts than skirts or dresses – and, specifically, short shorts. People are defiant in the face of whatever deluge the weather may bring, though a few are worrying about whether they’re in shape for showing so much leg!

Kate Moss may have set this trend a few years ago, but microshorts and Hunter wellies look set for another very strong showing in 2011.

The alternative Glasto outfit

Where people were talking about taking a “dress” it wasn’t so much a pretty tea frock but rather fancy dress. This year it’s less about costumes (e.g. pirates, zombies) and more about full-body suits – including wolf suits, badger suits, hazmat suits and boilersuits.

And don’t forget a silly hat to keep the sun (or the rain) off in style, and help your mates see you in the crowd.

Time to Test!

Will it turn out that expert bloggers make the best predictions? Or should you only trust a trend if it’s come from the wider Twitter community? Not only will we be analyzing photos and videos after the fact, we’ll be live-tweeting our findings as they come up on Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring system. Get in on the action by following @FaceCoCreation!

Once we get the data back, we’ll be announcing the conclusions to our question “Can social media be used to predict behaviour?” We’ll look at how these trends were shaped over time, what pressures impacted them, the journey they went through and the point at which they stabilised and became useful for prediction.

Last week we launched our Glasto Goes Social project, where we are testing the usefulness of social media monitoring in predicting future behavior. We thought we’d describe how we at Face go about doing a social buzz analysis project, and social media research in general. Most market researchers understand focus groups and surveys, but social media research is still new to many. The 5 steps are:

Step 1: Create Your Lexicon

This is telling your social media monitoring software what to look for. It is similar to a very complex Google search. The Glasto Goes Social Lexicon contains 324 separate searches capturing different ways of referring to the festival and different fashion brands and articles of clothing. The lexicon must be specific enough to target the particular question at hand, but also open enough to allow for the unexpected. This last is particularly important with prediction projects, like Glasto Goes Social.

We build lexicons by focusing on how the consumer talks. We start off with a simple Google search. Even the prompts from Google Instant can help us see what syntax the consumers are typing in. Google Real Time Search is also very handy when immediacy is important. Even simple Twitter Searches can be quite useful. These tools not only show us how a particular word is being used, but they also help us see similar words that we should try out next. Building a lexicon is a detail-oriented and iterative process.

Step 2: Cleaning the Data

Some of this data cleaning can be done right at the beginning by using negative search terms. We did this with Glasto Goes Social by editing out mentions of tents and tickets, important items that generally were mentioned all on their own, not in conjunction with clothing. But that’s just the beginning, but you have to leave wiggle room for the unexpected in Step 1

Unlike some other social media monitoring systems, Pulsar, our proprietary system here at Face, brings back all mentions of search terms, so there can be thousands of mentions to sort. We simplify the task by looking at the keywords. For Glasto, words like “tax” and “Arthur” are not relevant to our search, but some keywords are very relevant, like “wellies” and “hat.”

keyword search in Pulsar with added emphasis

Next you have to verify that the potential problems are indeed issues by looking at the actual results. In the case below it is certainly not relevant to our question, “What will people wear at Glasto?”

Step 3: Look at the Landscape

Once you’ve edited out the misleading results, you can begin to dig into the analysis stage. This is the fun part. The first step is to see what the data looks like and how it has behaved over time. We like to do this by looking at the Topics strata over time visualisation. This particular feature of the tool groups keywords into semantic chunks, the “topics of conversation”, and shows how these trends are developing day-on-day or week-on-week.  For Glasto, as you can see, during the second week the “Hunter” wellington boot brand became a more important topic, and “T-Shirt” began to shrink in importance.

screen shot of Pulsar’s Topics feature with added emphasis

We can also look at which influencers are more important, and how they are engaging their followers around a particular topic. Pulsar lets us identify influencers according to three dimensions: volume, visibility and engagement. Elle UK has the largest amount of visibility, but it is a person, not a company, that leads the pack with engagement.

screen shot of Pulsar’s influence by engagement feature

Step 4: Deep Dives

From here on, instead of just looking at the graphics, you look at the content. While looking at the landscape, you developed questions like ‘Why did “Hunter” suddenly become more important in Week 2 of the project?’ You may even have a hypothesis. Step 4 is when you test it.

Delve into the semantics of the individual messages and even look outside of your social media monitoring system for environmental factors. Look at how message content changes depending on the channel. Pulsar tracks blogs, social networks, images, video, news, and micro-blogs, and each channel is slightly different. Study the sentiment analysis, too. Sentiment analysis is notoriously unreliable. Computers just have difficulty feeling emotions. But there are ways around this. For instance, Pulsar uses actual people to code whether or not the sentiment is positive or negative around a particular keyword. Step 4 is when you look for the reasons behind what you see.

Step 5: Conclusions

Congratulations! You have done your analysis and it is finally time to draw up your conclusions. You have KeyNote up on your computer and are ready to present.

But if you were hoping for the conclusions to our Glasto Goes Social prediction project, you’ll just have to wait a little longer. We’ll release our predictions early next week. See you then!

This week, Sharmila and Fran were very flattered to be invited back to Said Business School at Oxford University to talk to their MBA students about all things social media and new methods in research.  Save for National Rail’s attempt to stop them getting there (we’re looking at you, Reading rail signal box), the day went really well, as they brought to life why there is a real need for new, evolving research methodologies, and the significant role that social media research can play in the marketing and research arena.  As part of the process, our group of students have now been tasked with carrying out their own social media research using Face’s proprietary social media monitoring tool, Pulsar.  We’ll be back in Oxford next week to hear the results, and we can’t wait.