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.

We designed a research + technology solution based on Pulsar called RTO2 (Real-Time O2) to help the brand plug into real-time customer insights from social media.

Tomorrow we will be speaking at MRS Social Media Research conference about social media analysis research frameworks and tools and more generally on how to build accurate consumer insights from online conversations.

We will be presenting the work carried on within the RTO2 project (Real-Time O2) which involved designing a social media monitoring and social CRM platform, based on Face’s proprietary Pulsar monitoring technology, and conducting ongoing social media analysis to turn massive amounts of data into real-time insights and actionable tactical recommendation and strategic advice.

We are on at 10.30 (full programme here), say hello if you’re around!

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*RTO2 has just been nominated for a Best Innovation Award 2010

More on the same topic:

Introducing Pulsar

Real-Time Research, where do you start

Francesco will be heading over to the MRS New Media and Technology conference on the 19th November to join the conversation and present. Our Head of Web Research and Strategy will be discussing real time research and collaborative planning.

Research 3.0: real-time research and collaborative approaches for adaptive brand planning

• Measuring and monitoring online conversations about  brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
• Applying qualitative analysis to determine research  parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
• Identifying the conversation hubs and the  influencers across a wide range of channelss
• Using crowd-sourcing and co-creation methodologies  to achieve research,innovation and planning objectives
• Building iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process

Also on the bill are speakers from the BBC, Orange, Coca-Cola and Danone so it should be a very insightful look into the future. To see the full line up and get some more info on the conference CLICK HERE

A guide to the Co-Creation, Crowd-sourcing Conundrum (May 18)
A common mistake of those new to open innovation & research is to confuse the practice of co-creation with that of crowdsourcing. As a result I thought I would give a quick guide to both, hopefully clearing up any confusion people might have.

Sherlock Holmes and the origins of co-creation (June 11) 
Innovative doesn’t necessarily meannew. 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.

The Co-creation 6 Step Process: why we need a structured approach to brand-consumer collaboration (June 04)
When talking about co-creation people often get the impression that it’s not an exact science but more of an undefined practice. However here at Face we have aclear structured process for successful co-creation, and we thought it’s probably about time we talked about it! 

• Web 2.0 has given us new tools and new methodologies that weren’t there 5 years ago to help us get much closer to our customers and to stay close to them for continuous periods of time. We can achieve this by spending a lot less of our client’s money – critical during this economic down turn.

• More consumers want to play and be given more responsibility in the research process. Their increasing desire to be listened to and involved more directly in what a brand does and says means that now more than ever there is a great opportunity to research with consumers rather than at them.

• We’ve got the chance to be more ambitious not just in terms of uncovering deeper and better insights but also in turning those insights into great products that make money for our clients.

• Co-creation means there is a big opportunity for researchers to become the real champions of consumer involvement, as well as the key drivers for it within an company. This will undoubtedly mean us taking on the responsibility of not just encouraging companies to open up to consumers but also generating new ideas, methodologies and tools to helping make this happen. By becoming the gatekeeper to co-creating and crowdsourcing with consumers – letting consumers really influence what a brand or company does – researchers will transform their role into a more strategic, interesting and valuable one.

As an afterthought I was not aware until recently that the quality of the exchanges we made during our session have prompted some of the nice people at MRS to shortlist us for the Special Contribution to Conference Award for your debate at Research 2009: The Annual Conference. It would be great to keep this thread going with anyone elses thoughts on other opportunities out there. Next month we will cover more on oppotunities, threats and ambitions.

Andrew's Idea Rush

At the MRS Conference last month I was invited to take part in the Ideas Rush an exercise where you have 5 minutes to talk about one idea and you are only allowed one slide to help you communicate it. I decided that my idea was going to start with a balloon and end with a massive bang. I asked the 70-80 delegates in the room to stand up; muster up as much energy as possible and then blow up their balloons with it. After they had tied their balloon I then instructed them to write 1% on it with a black marker pen before then placing the balloon on their seat.

The name of my idea (you guessed it) was the 1%ers (or “Adfluentials” as we call them at Face). As brands’ leading edge consumers they place an increasingly important role in the co-creation process. To find them brands need to start looking at consumers in a fundamentally different way – not just as potential customers who want to buy something from them but as people who want to have a relationship with them.

The 1%ers are not passive respondents but active equals in your brand and they sit at the top of a  brand relationship pyramid. They are:

1. Generally passionate about your category;

2. Passionate about your brand;

3. Have a set of skills that you could harness in co-creation

4. Have a large peer network

The key to getting the most out of your 1%ers is to worry less about how you are going to influence them in the  hope that they will influence the rest of your potential customer base and worry more about how you are going to let them influence YOU.

If brands are prepared to let the 1%ers influence them, then the energy and the impact they can create for  the brand could be as much if not more than the energy and the impact we created in the room by sitting on our balloons all at once. BANG!

Last week I gave a presentation to the MRS Youth Conference. It was a packed full agenda with Face represented on two fronts (Youth Programme Agenda) – the first of which, “Embracing Co-creation and collaboration approaches for generating creative ideas and driving new product development” I gave with Nadia from Lynx. The five key themes  that came out of our session are summarised below and are already generating some positive interest ( WARC and  Contagious).

1. Let youth influence you – worry less about how as a brand you are going to influence young people and worry more about how you are going to let them influence you and where the brand is going. This means taking a less top down and more bottom up approach to youth engagement and treating young consumers as equal participants in the brand marketing process.

2. Understand who your 1%ers are – “the adfluentials” as we call them of the brand – they are the people with the passion, skills and network to co-create with you – they will be prepared to jump through some serious hoops to be part of what you do and say. Invest in them.

3. The role of us the experts in this process is critical. We are the “co” in co-creation and set the context for getting the most out of our consumer’s creativity and passion.

4. To get the best out of your 1%ers creativity there needs to be a coherent structure/process which combines on-line and off-line methodologies to deliver much better results. The work we have done with Axe/Lynx and which Nadia shared with the Conference demonstrates how our co-creation process is achieving fantastic Bases results.

5. Be prepared to show leadership and ambition – you will need it to match the leadership and ambition shown by your co-creators – leadership not just in specific co-creation projects but also in the wider context. Co-creation can empower researchers to become the real champions of consumer involvement, as well as the key drivers for it within an company (Esomar Paper). This will undoubtedly mean taking on the responsibility of not just encouraging companies to open up to consumers but also generating new ideas, methodologies and tools to helping make this happen.

Unfortunately I was not able to end with the video because of technical problems but it is a good reminder of why we should not underestimate how far young consumers are prepared to go in sharing their creativity with us as part of the brand marketing or innovation process. In this example 4 students via Headbox created an advertisement for Doritos/Pepsico as part of their campaign “You make it, we play it” taking them 250 hours to make. Enjoy.

This reminded me of days when I used to do lots of lots of focus groups and I would always try and have a chat with respondents ‘after’ the group was formally finished. It was amazing how quickly peoples voice, vocabulary and responses changed – i.e became more natural -  once the group was officially over. This just shows how setting up formal environments can create formal responses and this is something we have tried to work against in the communities we run.

However, as a good challenge to that I was approached at the end by a couple of people from the BBC who had their own experiences of running a community online – designed to generate and create feedback on and ideas for BBC3 programs I believe. They came up and said that their principle in the past had been to keep people separate in order to avoid group effects and people just agreeing with one another and coalescing around one point of view.  Well, we chewed the fat a bit about different ways of doing things, and it reminded me that one of the great things about the way we approach communities is that it does allow you to almost simultaneously do a lot of individual and communal work – a great benefit that should not be overlooked.  At least the exchange proved that someone in the audience was listening which was great!