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Archive for the ‘Co-Creation’ Category

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The nice juicy feature in April’s edition of Research Magazine! Entitled The Sweet Smell of Success is now online on their site. The piece is a case study about our work with Axe/Lynx on Twist, the fragrance that changes. Written by Face Managing Director Job Muscroft the article explains the inner workings of the Twist project and the importance of involving consumers in the marketing process.

Unilever’s Lynx (or Axe if you’re outside the UK) is a global deodorant brand. The challenge it faces in product development and communications is to innovate constantly to keep its young consumers interested and engaged. The Lynx brand and insight team are always looking at ways of staying closer to their young consumers, in order to stay relevant.

A key strategy is to launch new variants of the product. Lynx has come up with some great products recently including the hugely popular Dark Temptation, promoted by ads featuring a man made of chocolate. For the launch of the 2010 variant it was going to be important to build on this and reinforce Lynx’s ‘quality fragrance’ credentials once more. Face was commissioned to develop the new variant and its fragrance using co-creation, in an effort to generate engaging product concepts and communications based on strong, well-articulated consumer insights.

The brief
The brief was challenging in its simplicity for a deodorant brand: How can Lynx talk about freshness in a new and engaging way?

Read on at Research-Live.com

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This morning we took part in the latest Digital Salon and Surgery at Farringdon’s Free Word Centre to talk about digital innovation for arts brands and organizations, discussing how they are innovating to meet contemporary digital challenges.

It was a very interesting session with a packed panel of six speakers discussing the topic from various angles and presenting some great case studies like the upcoming Chromaroma Oyster Card game (below) and the recent RSC Twitter production “Such Tweet Sorrow” supported by the 4iP fund or ‘NT Live’, a new initiative from the National Theatre which enables live performances to be broadcast onto cinema screens across the UK and worldwide, as well as the NMC Music Map and the cutting-edge ‘PureDyne’ project, an Open Source Linux operating system and multimedia toolbox maintained by the Goto10 Collective.

Eleanor Wilson from NMC Recording showing the audience the NMC Music Map

We talked about our open innovation approach and adaptive brand planning model, how Arts organizations could benefit from real-time research, crowd-sourcing and  co-creation and what this all means from a broader cultural perspective. I guess one of the most fascinating implications of taking this approach to the arts space is that it makes the progressive switch from creation to emergence models quite blatant. Understanding the radical change in the role of experts/curators and artists into the cultural ecosystem and understanding what open processes mean in terms of cultural innovation (leading/reacting, educating the audience/learning from the audience, creating new markets/feeding into existing ones) are key questions for the Arts but are totally relevant for the FMCG brands and the technology innovation ecosystem too. So I guess a Creation vs Emergence post is on its way!

For now, thanks again to Arts Council England, IT4Arts, Open Mute and Digital Salon for having us today, it was fun!

Chromaroma Visualisations from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Blog, Co-Creation, Insights

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We're In Research Magazine…

  • Date April 14 2010
  • Posted by Matt
  • Tagged with
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We have a nice juicy feature in April’s edition of Research Magazine! Entitled The Sweet Smell of Success the piece is a case study about our work with Axe/Lynx on Twist, the fragrance that changes. Written by Face Managing Director Job Muscroft the article explains the inner workings of the Twist project and the importance of involving consumers in the marketing process.

It can be found on page 32 & 33 of this months Research Magazine.

“To launch Twist, a new men’s fragrance in its global Axe brand, Unilever turned to a preapproved crowd of eager young amateurs for help.

In July 2008, Unilever executives convened 16 regular young men and women from around the world at a meeting in New York. Why? To tap them for ideas for a new global fragrance for Axe, a brand of men’s body spray, antiperspirant, and shower gel. The company had previously experimented with consumer-driven product development for local launches, but never for one on such a large scale…” READ MORE

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Blog, Co-Creation, Research Communities

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Philip Nominated for MRS Award!

  • Date March 29 2010
  • Posted by Matt
  • Tagged with
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Screen shot 2010-03-29 at 11.31.36

We’re delighted to announce that Face Research Director Philip McNaughton has been nominated for the Best Paper Award @ the 2010 MRS Research Awards.

Philip’s paper ‘Co-Creating Insights’ was put together in collaboration with Coca-Cola’s Beth Corte Real. Documenting the findings and learning’s from our recent community, co-creation and insight work with Coca-Cola the paper was also converted into a presentation and showcased at the recent Market Research Conference 2010.

You can check out the presentation HERE

Congratulations Philip, we’re all very proud of you!

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