Mindbubble has been a hive of activity in recent months, not only have the usual bundle of co-creation, crowdsourcing and research projects been going on but also the Mindbubble blog has been brimming with new and exciting content.
We have assembled a crack team of Mindbubble members to blog for the community and keep us up to date with what is going on in their lives. Check out the links below to see some of the most recent posts and get to know our Mindbubble blogging team!
Crowdsouring is a buzzword that has been knocking around for a while now. There is a lot of thought, theory and ongoing conversation about it, and we’re starting to see brands begin to use it in various different formats.
But how does it work in the research & innovation world?
‘Journey To The Centre Of The Crowd… And Back Again’ explores crowdsourcing from it’s definition and gives hints, tips and strategy advice on how you can implement crowsourcing for innovation.
Listen to the crowd, but do not lose control!
Let’s be clear I don’t believe the crowd (without being very selective about your crowd) alone can give you fully formed insights, npd ideas and creative executions. I do believe however that the crowd and the web should play an instrumental role in research, planning and innovation. So here are 3 ways that the crowd should be used to help you crack these types of briefs:
Listen to the crowd
The web hosts conversations on pretty much every subject a researcher or planner could ever want to know about. In fact it is the biggest research resource we have access to so start using it. There are a number of tools including our own pulsar social media monitoring and analysis platform that allow us to listen to the crowd. When you start listening you will quickly find consumer problems that need solving, what brands are hot and not and lots of opportunities to engage with Pro-am consumers. Listening in real time to what consumers are discussing is addictive and very powerful if it feeds into an adaptive planning process.
Ask the crowd
Crowdsourcing is best used in the early stages of a project. Again there are lots of platforms you can use – we have developed our own platform that we are currently using for www.cocreatelondon.com. The process starts by giving consumers a clear question or challenge to respond to. What you will get back is a diverse mass of topline ideas, thoughts and some fully rounded responses. The role of the planner/ researcher with the help of clever filtering software is to look at the patterns from this data. What lays behind the ideas – in short what are the insights. Insights that can be used by planners to build platforms for innovation or communication.
Crowd wisdom
By opening up ideas in a crowdsourcing community for comment and rating you can see clearly user-generated clusters. This engagement amongst the community can highlight the strong ideas or themes; but just as importantly it can start the process of collaboration and co-creation to make ideas better and more appealing.
Mindbubble was launched in 2008
At the beginning of 2008 Face’s online qualitative research communities began to gather pace. First, net giant Google teamed up with us to create a three-month immersive research community with teenagers. The community focused on the future & relevance of internet search and produced some amazing insights that are still thought highly of within Google. Following on from this Doritos commissioned us to create a community steering group with the intention of helping the brand open up their communication and develop a clear social media strategy for their ‘You Make It, We Play It’ crowd-sourcing campaign.
In the Summer of 2008 we worked alongside Tango in a combined online and face-to-face co-creation project. The aim was to define the planning and positioning of Tango for their 2009 re-launch. The project was successful and led to the release of ‘Tango With Added Tango’ in May 2009 and provided the backbone for the overall Save Tango campaign.
Tango With Added Tango - A Co-Created Product
By this time social media had spread across many demographics, and it was quickly learnt that co-creation could be applied to any audience, anywhere, at any time.
With this revelation firmly at the front of our mind we started to explore the relationship between women, technology and the internet. This exciting new space was already being asked about by clients who were interested in how they could use Face’s approach to get closer to women, the gatekeepers of family life. The result of our interrogation into this subject was the original Women & the Web 2.0 Report.
The results of this were astounding, much like youth in previous years, women were creating a niche for themselves, finding their own space on the web. The knock-on effect of the report saw Face engage a group of women both online and face-to-face to build the first co-creation community for women, Mindbubble!
It was an instant hit. Boots were the first brand to work alongside the Mindbubble ladies, co-creating new products for their make-up lines. Following in the footsteps of Boots came Surf, Knorr, Dove, Comfort and Air Wick, all wanting to harness the power of the opinionated and creative Mindbubble ladies.
Moving into 2009 and we did not rest on our laurels, the natural restlessness within the company lead to the development and launch of Face Wired. Designed to develop the potential of co-creation in the planning sphere, Wired immediately teamed up with The Carphone Warehouse to help develop their social media strategy. The Carphone project included the use of Pulsar, Face’s brand new real time research tool.
Pulsar is Face's Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology
Pulsar enabled Carphone to get even closer to their consumers and listen to what people were saying online. The speed and accuracy of Pulsar meant that the results could immediately be plugged into innovation and planning movements.
By this time, the floodgates were open; the size of the team had quadrupled and Midford Place, Face’s headquarters, had become the epicentre of everything co-creation. Community, Social Media and Co-Creation projects were coming in thick and fast and as our ambitious goals were beginning to be reached, another organic step was taken, adapting the co-creation process for advertising.
Next up… Part 3: Say Hello to The Hub
Women, especially mothers, are gatekeepers and budget masters; they own the keys to the marvellous world of consumption, proudly sat on the throne of purchasing power. Traditionally when women are mentioned in the same sentence as video games, people will automatically think it is something to do with controlling their children’s gaming habits. However, believe it or not, women do buy video-games for themselves, as part of their own personal entertainment and are now fast becoming equal in the gaming world. So next time you come across a pretty and well-equipped female Blood Elf in World of Warcraft, she is probably a real girl and not a guy pretending to be one!!
• Why have we never talked about girl gamers before?
In the USA, 40% of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (34%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%).
The reason why women didn’t get into gaming sooner, is probably down to the repelling image of female characters in video games. Very often in a secondary role, female characters have mainly been sexualised and stereotyped, which represents a real obstacle to any identification process and therefore interest in the game.
According to Helen W. Kennedy “The console games market has traditionally been very explicit in their exclusive address to a male audience. In the late 80s and early 90s both Nintendo and Sega made it very clear that to attempt to market games for girls would threaten their real market – boys and young men. Sony’s Playstation, by addressing youth culture in general, broke with this tradition”
Fortunately, this trend has changed, moving towards a set of powerful, fit, fast and precise female characters.
The Female Blood Elf - Probably Controlled by a Real Girl!!!!
• Is there a video game type for women?
Women don’t have as much time to dedicate towards video gaming as men do. Their lifestyle, children, and household care take up a lot of time on the top of their work! They are more likely to hook up with a game where they can, jumping in and out without being blocked in long-term objectives or achievements to reach.
The importance of the pace occurs with any genre of game. For example Grand Thief Auto, even though rated as one of the most violent and offensive games, does procure instant fun and entertainment, and therefore, generally, women enjoy it.
Something that EA understood very well with The Sims, is that women like to personalize their characters and create something they can identify with. The desire to escape reality in cyberspace tends to be a common element across genders; however, women do place greater importance on the customization of characters and gaming environments.
• So what’s the secret recipe for the perfect video game for girl?
Women who are into gaming, whether for work or pleasure, gather in associations to lobby for the access of video gaming careers to women, by subsidizing loans or giving career advices to young girls. Women want to see “more women making games, and thus, to make more games that women want to play.”
In reality, the number of women working in the industry is already rising: for example 60% of the developers behind The Sims are women. However, this may not be the miracle that women are waiting for. Sherry Floyd , a game designer at SOE’s Seattle studios, comments “I honestly don’t think it’s a gender issue,” she continues. “I think it’s a marketing issue.”
In the popular subconscious, women playing video games are abnormal: games are for guys. Unless they are accompanying their male partner, females are not seen as legitimate in video gaming temples (cyber cafes, game shops etc..). For example, women are more likely to under-report the number of hours the play then men, as if being a video gamer does not fit with being a women.
In statistics, female players are shown as two major clusters: casual gamers brought in by a partner or sibling, and hardcore gamers. But in reality, girl gamers are much more immersed in gaming than the stats like to show, and it’s this ability to adapt their gaming time that the industry should focus on to attract the female segment.
Playstation saw sense and avoided the 'Shrink It & Pink It' approach
• The girl gamers are crying out loud: give us a real segmentation!
As the figures show, women are now a real sub-group of the market: why not consider them as such?
Fortunately, women can salute the corporate effort to integrate female developers, as it helped the gaming industry to avoid the catastrophe of a full “shrink it and pink it” strategy. However, there is still a gap between the current offer (both products and marketing strategy) and the real landscape of female consumers.
Sources:
Entertainment Software Association
http://gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/#top
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/02/28/women.gamers/index.html
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