So why is this a problem and why am I even talking about it? Well the fact is I don’t think FMCGs’ undisrupted status can last, and the fact that they sell tangible physical products isn’t going to be enough to protect them.

Dollar Shave Club is a service business that should send shivers down the spine of the executives at P&G’s Gillette as well as other FMCG Brands. Their proposition is simple: you pay as little as a dollar a month to have razor blades delivered to your door. It sounds like a simple and small-scale online business, so why do I think it might raise some scary thoughts for the big players?

1) You don’t need to own your supply chain

It’s become simpler than ever to find third party vendors in emerging markets, who’ll manufacture products like razors at the right price, quality and in limited quantity. It’s also become easier to use outsourced logistics to move and store your product around the globe.

2) You don’t need massive distribution

Part of the reason for big FMCGs’ hegemony is their ability to negotiate a huge presence in the supermarkets we all use for our weekly shop. With the increasing use of online shopping,  Dollar Shave deliberately chose to sell only online avoiding the need for such large scale relationships.

3) You don’t need to spend millions on comms

Much of the cost of FMCG products is incurred through their branding and marketing activities. Dollar Shave avoids this by leveraging the power of social media to create an engaging brand presence and one of the most shared viral ads this year.

4) Technically generic products are often good enough

In the continuing arms race between the big FMCGs, the quest to create technically superior products is unceasing. But dollar shave recognises that after years of development standard razor blades are good enough and that many recent innovations are superfluous.

5) Selling direct strips out a huge proportion of costs

All the above means that you can take a product direct to consumers for a much lower price point than with the traditional FMCG retail distribution model. So Dollar Shave can sell a product that is as good, or certainly good enough, at a disruptively low price point.

6) Going direct creates an ongoing service relationship with customers

An issue for FMCGs is that they are being disintermediated at the point of purchase by supermarkets and their own-brand products. The beauty of the Dollar Shave model is that it allows the brand to have a direct relationship with its customers which is ongoing and which provides an opportunity to sell other shaving and grooming-related products in future.

So let’s see what happens in the months and years to come. I’m betting that there won’t be a large change overnight, but the opportunity for disruption in FMCG is certainly there and will be capitalised upon. For me the key to doing this will be to break free from the idea of pushing product through retail and beginning to create more direct relationships with consumers via digital services and social media.

It would be great to hear your opinions on this topic. Have you seen any more interesting examples of service disruption in FMCG?

For us, a co-creative approach permeates everything we do from project design, from recruitment to debrief, across every type of brief from qual insight to campaign tracking – it’s built into the heart of every methodology and tool we employ on a project. So I’m going to give you a little insight into our top tips for successfully co-creating, gleaned from our five years of experience.

Principle 1:  Listen

Co-creation shouldn’t just be about creating, it should also be about listening – after all it is from great insight, foresight and inspiration that the best ideas will arise. We always begin every co-creation project by undertaking a stage of listening, whether that be:

• listening to the conversations going on around categories, brands or topics through social media monitoring
• deep-diving into the hubs and influencers of those conversations via netnography
• or listening to the behavioural “conversations” that happen between the consumer and the context via ethnography.

Principle 2: Mix individual and group thinking

We believe that neither of these things are enough on their own and that each has its role both in the generation of ideas and the refinement and honing of them.

Crowdsourcing, whether done openly on the web or closed with a specific fan base, through the process of individual (yet open and iterative) thinking yields a huge wealth of individual data that allows the researcher to spot trends and clusters that can provide both platforms for ideation or positioning and hypotheses about interesting directions.

However, in our experience, the most value from crowdsourcing comes when this is supplemented with more targeted exploration and explosion of the opportunities with a smaller number of invested participants. We often use our online communities such as HeadBox and Mindbubble to ratify and validate the opportunity areas identified from crowdsourcing, and make sure that the group that will ultimately develop concepts from those opportunities are working on the most interesting, fertile and well-developed of those areas.

Individual and group thinking of course also has to come into play within your actual “co-creation” – whether that be a face-to-face workshop or online. It’s really important to ensure that your task design includes a mix of both individual thinking tasks and more group-based collaboration in order to create the right balance of fertility and validity, as well as to allow for differences in the ways people think, create and process information.

Principle 3: Build effective teams

Managers know that there is a whole science behind building an effective team, and there is no shortage of academic models and theories to aid this. Building teams in co-creation is no different. While obviously conducting a full Belbin or Myers Briggs analysis before each co-creation is unrealistic, it is possible to use principles from both when building teams for co-creation. We build in Myers Briggs and Belbin-style questions into our recruitment process, and qualitatively evaluate consumers further through our interactions with them both in our communities, and in the co-creation “auditions” we hold that put our potential participants through their paces before they earn their place at the co-creation. Oh, and of course we’re also always qualitatively analysing our clients and their stakeholders for the same reasons.

Principle 4: Play

Creativity strikes when analysis stops and so co-creation should always be fun (so should any qual research, but that’s another blog post entirely). This permeates everything from where you do it (somewhere disruptive and creative of course), to how you set up and brief in the whole day.

At Face we use gamification principles such as badging, earning status levels, and unlocking rewards for completion of specific tasks to make the process feel less like work and more like play, to aid team bonding, and to establish a sense of competition that ultimately increases investment and therefore quality of output.

However, we also have a philosophy around the ratio of true “work” activities (those that are geared to meeting the objectives of the co-creation) and those that are more “play” activities geared towards breaking down inhibitions, improving communication, encouraging people to think in different ways, and re-energising. We think the best ratio is 60:40 – ice breakers, energisers, physical games are all an incredibly important part of running a successful co-creation.

Principle 5: Keep the pace

Pressure helps spontaneous thinking, while craft requires time, so successful co-creation involves flexing the pace both to keep interest and to get better output – whether co-creating online or face-to-face. We have found that the most successful co-creations set more aggressive deadlines for tasks that are more generative, require non judgmental thinking, or in fact require choices to be made within a group (even if you then allow more time to explore that choice later on), while those tasks that require refinement, articulation, or building up of ideas require both more time and a more relaxed introduction/facilitation style. This sounds obvious, but it’s really about pushing those boundaries a bit in terms of how long you think each exercise needs, depending on what the task in hand is.

Principle 6: Get creative

Our final principle governs the sorts of activities we do in co-creation to yield great results. Co-creation for us isn’t simply an extension of the traditional stimulus/response model of traditional research, except with clients in the room asking the questions. For us building a co-creation is itself an exercise in creation. We use various techniques from theatre and the arts to create an immersive and engaging creative experience that yields insight and ideas almost indirectly – role plays, story telling, consequences, real time illustration, and physical modelling are all techniques that can deliver incredible insight and stimulate ideas beyond the direct objective for which you are using them.

Co-creation is here to stay, and we look forward to continuing to find new and inspiring ways to deliver best in class results for our clients!

How would you describe your role?

We are at the heart of what Face does, every day. From project kick-off, I manage the logistics around ensuring fieldwork is set up, and that the necessary processes have been thought through in order for the project to run smoothly.

The production team oversees:

• drafting screeners
• recruiting either directly or through global and local field partners
• booking workshop venues
• making travel arrangements
• providing relevant equipment
• managing budgets
• and coordinating amongst all teams

How did you become a production manager? What’s your background?

I studied Event Management whilst working at an events company in South Africa.  I then moved to London and found a job managing a world-class viewing facility, which sounded perfect because the research element interested me and it was like coordinating mini-events all day, every day. This was my first step into the marketing research world.

I joined Face in January 2011 as Production Manager and have loved working on a different range of methodologies, mainly co-creation, as it was something that was new to me coming from a traditional qualitative background.  At Face I am surrounded by a team who are inspiring and who absolutely live up to their respective roles.

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

From project kick off, I manage the logistics around ensuring fieldwork is set up, and that the necessary processes have been thought through in order for the project to run smoothly. You need to have good knowledge of research methodologies and have good relationships with fieldwork partners and recruiters alike.  It is essential to have good delegation, time management and communication skills in order to deliver projects smoothly and on time.  As I oversee budgets to make sure projects are profitable, it is key that I work alongside the commercial team when costing for projects and evaluate the budget continually throughout the project.  This is a role where flexibility is key and giving up is not an option!

What are the top rules you have to follow as a production manager in market research?

1. Get a good brief from the commercial team / researchers in order to brief in field correctly and limit changes.  A good brief should include the approach and methodology, the sample criteria and quotas, timings, locations, and logistics information, like accommodations and catering.
2. Negotiate costs with suppliers – however never compromise quality for cost.
3. Take risks and push yourself with more creative approaches
4. Remain flexible but not at the expense of the research. For example, make changes to the screener – however if this eats in to recruitment time this may jeopardize your research, e.g. having to shift the timings or to decrease your sample if necessary.

What’s the biggest mistake you most often see in production management? What’s so bad about it, when it does go wrong?

If the screener is not perfect this will affect the sample and sometimes can totally affect the research.  It is one of the most important documents in the project set-up and sign-off phase.

The problems that can come up with screener writing can be:

1. When there are too many opinions involved in sign-off.  This tends to make the screener complex and too long. Keeping it simple, compact with a good flow is important.
2. If there are specific segments that are required and an algorithm is not supplied to the research agency, participants might fall into more than one segment affecting the sample and the research.  Where segments are required, algorithms should always exist.
3. Making multiple changes to the screener or details during fieldwork.  This confuses the recruiter / partner and although one change is usually fine, multiple changes have bigger chances of impacting the project negatively if not tracked and followed up throughout fieldwork.

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

The way the industry is evolving, I think co-creation will be done less face-to-face and more online (online chat groups, online communities etc) so it is key to ensure our online platforms are able to accommodate this.  They need to be user-friendly and faultless.

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/10-reasons-why-we-visualise-data-dvizldn-bdw-bigdataweek.html http://www.facegroup.com/10-reasons-why-we-visualise-data-dvizldn-bdw-bigdataweek.html#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:36:26 +0000 Francesco http://www.facegroup.com/?p=9028 Data Visualisation is a key tool in a any researcher’s toolbox nowadays. But since graphic methods were first designed and then revisited with the introduction of computers, we kind of stopped questioning data visualisation in terms of the real value that’s adding to our research and our ability to produce new knowledge.

Now with Big Data and the Real-Time web we are entering a whole new phase in the history of data Visualisation. New challenges lie ahead and new methods are being devised, so we felt compelled to look into it again to try and focus on how exactly data visualisation really helps us make sense of complexity.

Fresh from our presentation at BigDataWeek London last night, here’s a quick intro to the 10 reasons why we like visualising data.

10 Reasons Why We Visualise Data

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]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/the-death-of-surveys-what-next.html http://www.facegroup.com/the-death-of-surveys-what-next.html#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:09:25 +0000 Andrew http://www.facegroup.com/?p=9015 Flickr: By The Paperclip

This article was originally published in Research World Magazine‘s March/April 2012 issue. In it, Andrew Needham, Face CEO and Founding Partner, discusses what needs to be done for social media analysis to provide real research insights.

“Will Social Media Replace Surveys as a Research Tool?” This Advertising Age headline from March 2011 sent ripples through the industry. Joan Lewis, the top research executive of Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest research buyer, predicted a dramatic decline in the importance of surveys by 2020 due to the rise of social media.

Her reasoning was simple: with so much real-time data about our customers, structured research is less relevant. The decline of surveys was used as one example in a much bigger debate about how the research industry must change if it is to keep up with emerging client needs. As she said, it is less about methodology or sample representation and more about finding that game-changing insight. But in a consumer landscape that is changing so quickly, how do you efficiently extract meaningful insight from all the ‘big data’ consumers are producing? How do you connect all the dots?

The answers to these questions lie with technology and learning new skills. The research industry needs to embrace technology to develop social and community-based tools that are better configured to the needs of client CMI departments. In terms of dashboards, tools such as Radian6 and Sysomos are very good when it comes to social listening, but we are in the business of generating social media insight. Crafting quality insights requires customised data, and bespoke algorithms and modules. Clients are demanding more depth when it comes to understanding audiences’ relationships with a brand via the social web. A key challenge has been anonymity. Trying to pinpoint an audience demographically has not been possible, but it has been possible to track relationships through passions and interests. By developing a more dynamic and real-time approach to audience segmentation, brands can deliver content that is relevant and meaningful.

Technology can also help researchers extract more meaningful insight from the data by moving beyond analysing conversations by volume and doing more to understand the data’s impact and influence – its ‘visibility’. This requires weighting the data using specific algorithms for each social media channel. Furthermore, all current social media mining tools look only at content, and overlook context and behavioural data. This means that most of them are not making the most of the data feast. When it comes to community platforms there is much that can be improved, but integrating social media data in real time is key. Real value comes from mapping the data onto the rest of the research toolbox.

These innovations need to come thick and fast because clients want to be able to connect the dots between different data sets to better project what is going to happen in the future. To do this effectively requires more human analysis and consulting working alongside technology. The industry needs to look outwards so it can attract different types of people with different skill sets. Finding researchers who are also technologists, or technologists who are also social anthropologists is difficult, but we are going to see a greater mix of technological skill sets with more traditional ones. This mix will lead to the development of new methodological frameworks, powered by technology, to help gather and analyse those game-changing insights in a consumer landscape that is changing so quickly.

As Joan Lewis said, “When we’re doing it, we need to do it well. It’s really been easy for people to take the idea that the world is changing as an excuse to do really poor work. And there’s no excuse.”

]]> 2 http://www.facegroup.com/the-researchers-role-in-social-media-marketing.html http://www.facegroup.com/the-researchers-role-in-social-media-marketing.html#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:42:58 +0000 Job http://www.facegroup.com/?p=9009 In 2012 we are reaching a tipping point where marketing strategies are finally moving from traditional broadcast to content-led social media engagement. So the question I pose is, What role can researchers play in helping brands succeed in this brave new world?

Here are 3 areas where as an industry we can add real value to the new social marketing process:

Return on Engagement Specialists

The rules for this new model of marketing are still being written and this has led to a position where many digital agencies are still marking their own homework. With the larger investments being made in this space by brands, research agencies are well positioned to play the role of objective analytics partner. As researchers we should be offering clients advice on developing KPIs for their social media activity, helping them to design the right measurement framework, and making sure they select the right tools for social data collection. Beyond simple measurement, researchers also have the opportunity to help clients develop return-on-engagement models that demonstrate the link between behavioural data and the impact on the things that clients really want to measure, e.g. consumption.

Return on engagement

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Fanbase Analysts

Many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors. However, there’s more to social media research than tracking conversations by keywords. Brands are social entities. People establish connections with them (cognitive, emotional, functional) and these connections foster further connections to other people. As brands build audiences online, it is increasingly important to understand and map audiences and the content and passions that connect them. When brands understand their social audience they can design content and strategies to engage them more effectively. Research agencies will have an increasingly important role in helping brands segment their social media audiences and give strategic advice on strategies to engage them.

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter [UPDATED]

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Content Co-creators

Generating content that people want to share is a difficult business for brands as the traditional advertising creative process is disconnected from the communities they want to engage with.

To create social ideas that have the potential to be loved and shared by people in communities it is important to involve them in the creative process. This is why co-creation as a methodology of developing and refining content will become increasingly common over the next few years. Involving consumers in the production and creative development of content via MROC and co-creation sessions is a process that plays to the strengths of community researchers and those planners with great facilitation and social media expertise.

MRS Brand Research Conference

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]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/top-posts-of-the-past-augmented-research.html http://www.facegroup.com/top-posts-of-the-past-augmented-research.html#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:45:33 +0000 admin http://www.facegroup.com/?p=9001 A little over a year ago, our Francesco D’Orazio presented this slideshow at the WARC‘s “Online Research Now and Next” conference. Since then it has been one of our top presentations on Slideshare. Augmented Research is still relevant, which makes this presentation another installment of our Top Posts of the Past Series.

Augmented Research

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]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/top-posts-of-the-past-series-data-should-be-beautiful-playful-and-enlightening.html http://www.facegroup.com/top-posts-of-the-past-series-data-should-be-beautiful-playful-and-enlightening.html#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:24:27 +0000 admin http://www.facegroup.com/?p=8984 One of the challenges of the research profession is to present data and insights in easy to understand and engaging ways. Often the answer is data visualizations. Since infographics are getting ever more popular, this post from 2010 seemed appropriate as the second installment in our Top Posts of the Past series. Though the post is about two years old by now, these 5 tips for creating easy beautiful data visualizations are still quite relevant.

Data Should be Beautiful, Playful and Enlightening

As part of the onedotzero season at the BFI in November I attended a fascinating forum on Data Visualisation on Friday night. There were a number of speakers who showcased their work the highlight being David McCandless the author of Information is Beautiful.

The key themes from the event can be summed up as follows:

1. We live in an era of of information overload and huge complexity we need help to make sense of it all.

Continue Reading the Article Here

]]> 0 http://www.facegroup.com/blogs-top-posts-the-social-media-monitoring-process.html http://www.facegroup.com/blogs-top-posts-the-social-media-monitoring-process.html#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:48:25 +0000 admin http://www.facegroup.com/?p=8965 As part of a new blog series, we’ll be reposting some of the most popular blogs from the last three years. Though much has changed, a few things are bound to remain the same, and relevant, too. To kick it off, here’s a post we published last June as part of our Glasto Goes Social blog series. In this post we answered a common question: how do researchers go about doing a social media monitoring or insight project? We outlined the steps that we use at Face to set up and analyze social media searches, using the project we designed in order to predict fashion trends at Glasto, the UK music festival, as an example.

Glasto Goes Social #2: Social Media Monitoring Process

credit: El Bibliomata Flickr

Last week we launched our Gasto Goes Social project, where we are testing the usefulness of social media monitoring in predciting 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.

…

Continue the article here

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