Archive for the ‘Planning’ Category

Blog, Co-Creation, Innovation, Planning

Why experts should not fear co-creation

Date October 08 2009
Posted by Job
Tagged with

I have had a fantastic few weeks meeting some really interesting clients and agency people where we have been presenting & discussing co-creation. The first reaction in this type of meeting from advertising agencies and other experts in communication & design industries is hostility. To quote one advertising creative from a meeting this week “well if we hand over responsibility to the consumer we might as well get our p45′s and close down the office” I can understand this reaction and we might call this the “defensive expert” attitude. Because the training of most communication and design experts is based on creating value for their companies by owning
the science or magic of the creative process.

However I cannot help but be attracted to experts: creatives, planners, software architects, UX and fashion designers. I love them all: the nerdier, the better. It is a sheer joy to spend time with these people discovering their vocation and talent.

These kinds of experts love their jobs and they’re good at it and they can really inspire people. This is why this initial defensive reaction is to misunderstand the co-creation process and the important role they can play in it.
The trick for experts is to let go, to move from bottler of creativity to broker of knowledge and nurturer of ideas.

Inspire
Experts play a fundamental role when working with consumers – they are there to inspire consumers to engage with the subject and the challenge. The best co-creation projects always involve a passionate expert and a great example of this is Anne Gotelbe who inspired consumer to develop the next Axe/Lynx fragrance.
Creative Talent Spotting
Experts are also there to spot the golden nuggets of ideas or insights that can move the co-creation process on. In fact without this experienced trained eye co-creation would simply be a crowdsourcing exercise and we would be left with a sea of ideas. This involves editing and building on ideas, clustering, combining narrow and non visionary ideas into robust platforms, adding that crucial tweak that makes the idea really work for the client.
Nurture
Finally experts are there to mentor consumers and nurture the ideas that resonate. They are ultimately responsible for taking the ideas developed with consumers and bringing them to life within companies.

Blog, Co-Creation, Crowdsourcing, Planning, Social Media, Wired

Bottom up is not enough: Brand-e talks to Face about crowd-sourcing and co-creation

Date September 28 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

By Hugh Jordan. Wise mob. Barely a day goes by without a website, campaign or competition cropping up, promising to harness the collective wisdom of crowds – the likes of you and me – for the benefit of brands. brand-e spoke to Francesco D’Orazio, md of crowdsourcing and co-creation specialists Face Wired to get the skinny.

Firstly, for those who have been living under a rock this summer, what exactly do we mean by crowdsourcing?

Well, there are a number of definitions and, depending on your speciality, it may vary slightly. Essentially, it’s when a company broadcasts a problem to a crowd instead of getting one or two experts to work on solutions. It’s outsourcing to the masses – the key elements for most forms of crowdsourcing are bottom-up idea generation and peer-2-peer validation.

What are the benefits to brands in going down this route?

It’s a very productive way of using crowds. Crowdsourcing, in one form or another, has been around for about 15 years, but with social media, brands have found a way of harnessing crowd creativity on a much larger scale. And there is huge value for brands in this method. They get a global, diversified crowd, a wider range of talent, rich spontaneous insights – plus it’s cost effective, and it provides great word-of-mouth for the brand.

Sounds like a marketing director’s dream. Are there no drawbacks?

Crowdsourcing by itself is a bit limited, you need a top-down approach to counteract it – there has to be some way to funnel the data and ideas generated. Plus, crowdsourcing tends to be more of a vertical process, there is essentially a lack of collaboration – the best solutions come when people are allowed and encouraged to build on each other’s ideas. Also, because crowdsourcing is not targeted, brands cannot afford to give too much away about company strategy, meaning briefs can be somewhat limited in detail.

Are there workarounds?

When we work with brands we use a process called co-creation. It’s phase two, after crowdsourcing. It’s a way of brands collaborating directly with selected people from the crowdsourcing phase, to respond to a brief. Rather than conversing with 5,000 people as they would in crowdsourcing, they are talking to 20 to 25 highly targeted individuals through on- and offline activity. Co-creation provides the strong, strategic thinking that is missing from crowdsourcing.

Continue Reading on Brand-E

Activation, Blog, Co-Creation, Crowdsourcing, Planning, Social Media, Uncategorized, Wired

Introducing Face Wired: co-created communications planning with social media at its core

Date July 15 2009
Posted by Francesco
Tagged with

Over the last few months we have been busy developing Face Wired and we are now proud to say it has officially launched.

What is Face Wired?  A department within Face that specializes in co-created communications planning, with social media at its core.

Why did we create Face Wired?  Face has a great track record of co-creating with consumers to add real value to projects, whether it is insights or new product development. We have now decided to develop this and apply our expertise and co-creation processes to communications planning. And social media is at the heart of all this.

Social Media isn’t just another marketing channel, it’s the main platform where all media contents converge in terms of distribution and consumption, from tv to gaming, from press to radio, and, most importantly, to personal communications. That’s why Social Media has become today the main platform connecting brands with consumers and that’s why it should always be at the core of the brand strategy and of all brand communications.

Using social media as the environment and the tool to manage and foster brand-consumer collaboration, we designed a three step process to engage consumers and influencers into co-creating communications planning concepts:

- Listening: this is the social media immersion stage where we use Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring technology, to map and analyze the buzz about the brand, chart the topics, the issues and the perceptions associated with the brand and identify the influencers that we should involve in the co-creation process.

- Plan: we then bring together a group of users, experts, influencers and brand stakeholder to kick off the actual brand-consumer collaboration. A set of online crowd-sourcing tasks helps us defining the agenda and generating the initial concepts. The most interesting and popular ones are then taken to a smaller sample and a set of co-creation tasks, online and offline, allow us to build on the initial concepts, further develop them and finalize the outputs.

- Engage: Once we have co-created the strategy Face then work closely with the brand to make sure the strategy is implemented correctly or to directly manage the execution. We then train the brand team so they have the skills to manage social media engagement with communities once we have gone.

We have already worked on two very successful pilot projects with Dr Pepper and with Lynx on the Dark Temptation variant launch, which has been their most successful variant to date. We are currently working with Carphone Warehouse on a project about social media strategy that will have organization wide implications and Boots, to co-create marketing insights and communications plans.

Stay tuned for more info and juicy social media case studies!