Managing co-creation Job Muscroft and Andrew Needham

Warc Best Practice

March 2011

Warc Best Practice: Managing co-creation

Job Muscroft and Andrew Needham

Face

Co-creation is the commercial practice of developing insights, brands, products and other forms of intellectual property or

activity via collaboration with external consumers.

It is not the same as crowdsourcing, a term coined in 2006 for the policy of taking a function traditionally performed by

employees and outsourcing it to a large community of people in the form of an open brief. Procter & Gamble, Nike, Best Buy and Starbucks have all created digital platforms that allowed customers to respond to open briefs for creating new products

and messages. And crowdsourcing can be one element of a larger co-creation process, as in the model below (Fig 1).

Fig 1: Face co-creation model

But the essential and distinctive point about co-creation is that it brings brands and consumers together on a level footing and

at all stages of the process rather than calling the public in for a limited role at a middling or advanced stage in the

development of a new product or message.

Increasingly, co-creation is being applied to three specific areas, each raising different issues. These areas are co-creating

insights, co-creating ideas and co-creating brands.

Managing co-creationJob Muscroft and Andrew NeedhamWarc Best PracticeMarch 2011

Downloaded from warc.com

2

CO-CREATING INSIGHTS

Co-creation researchers need to take on a different role from that normally used in research projects. They need to step back,

acting more as facilitators and enablers of direct contact between brands and consumers, than as intermediaries and

interlocutors between brands and consumers.

Researchers need to ask themselves: how can I support conversations with consumers when they are thinking as individuals?

And when they are thinking as groups? And how can I support a structure and a leadership for consumers acting as a

collective?

Although co-creators also use offline techniques, it is no accident that co-creation's rise has coincided with the growth of the

internet as an environment for gaining insights and interacting with consumers, both when they are thinking and acting as

individuals and in more social contexts.

As part of this trend, netnography, a term coined by Professor Robert Kozinets, has emerged as a qualitative, interpretive

methodology often deployed in co-creation projects. Netnography uses ethnographic research techniques, optimised for digital

media, in order to study the social context in on-line communities.

Whatever the techniques involved, you need to decide whether you are going to talk to consumers in closed groups, by

bringing groups of consumers together with client stakeholders in bespoke web-based environments, or you are going to do so

in more open environments by taking client stakeholders out into existing communities of consumers on the internet.

CO-CREATING IDEAS

Fostering relationships between brands, consumers, experts and agencies is integral to co-creating ideas.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author, identified two types of failure that commonly occur when people try to predict the future. These were failure of imagination and failure of nerve. According to Clarke, failure of imagination occurs when the

forecaster either does not discover vital facts or does not even admit to the possibility of their existence. A failure of nerve can

happen when, in spite of possessing all the relevant facts, the researcher fails to draw the logical conclusion from them

because the facts were not marshaled correctly. In order to avoid either failure during the co-creation of ideas, it is important to

remember three rules.

A bottom-up approach is not enough: Bottom-up processes need to be complemented by solid strategic direction and

expertise. Successful innovations emerge at the intersection of three, sometimes very different, agendas: the consumer and

his needs, the brand and its strategy, the expert and his vision (he or she provides knowledge of the market and its trends).

Allow group thinking as well as individual thinking: Group thinking often generates and provides elements of validation, but it

is also skewed towards social conformity. On the other hand, individual thinking provides a more independent idea generation

process but it does not generate as much material. The best ideas often come from building on each other's contribution rather

than coming up with the final solution in one go. A balanced innovation process needs to ensure both dynamics are well

represented.

Open up: Allow ideas to come from anywhere and be prepared to let consumers take you to places you wouldn't expect to be

taken to.

Downloaded from warc.com

3

CO-CREATING BRANDS

Co-creation requires a move away from the traditional branding model whereby agencies and clients start by defining the

brand and its attributes, and towards a model which starts with the consumer.

As an example of this trend at work, Face applied co-creation techniques to help Reckitt Benckiser bring two of its existing

household care brands to the Chinese market. Our approach was designed to immerse the stakeholder teams in the specific

cultural nuances, aspirations and needs of Chinese consumers. A combination of community research, crowd-sourcing and co-

creation workshops helped to produce local translations of the global brand blueprint (conceptually, semantically,

linguistically and visually), that have subsequently been adopted more widely.

RECRUITING CONSUMERS

Consumers: There are broadly two types of consumers that should be involved in co-creation. The first group is made up of

people with a passion either for the category or the brand and also meet other additional, demographic criteria which ensure

participants represent the brand's target market. The second group is the One per cent elite of consumers, comprising

people that are both passionate about the brand and the category, and also have the skills to co-create.

Group one consumers will typically be asked to complete a task at an early stage in the process. For instance, a drinks

company might, via an online community, ask consumers to keep a video diary about their relationship to drink, creating video

clip interviews about people discussing drink in situations at home or in a bar. See figure 2

After this, the co-creation team may invite people to respond to a specific brief to gain a clearer sense of which ideas are

resonating within this community. A typical scenario might posit the consumer as the customer service director of an imaginary

mobile phone company tasked with developing one area from a list of potential company initiatives including repairs, in-store

expertise and online support for which the company could become world- famous.

Fig 2: Community Co-creation Tasks

One per cent customers: To find the kind of people who make up the second type of co-creation consumers the One per

cent-ers you need to be more explorative.

Downloaded from warc.com

4

You are looking for people who are:

passionate and knowledgeable about the brand/category

creative & confident

collaborative

A first stage in recruiting One per cent-ers might be to contact your target market via a brand's Facebook page or a specific co-

creation community. At this stage, you can profile people using a two-minute online survey to find a group of willing co-creators

who meet your project specific criteria.

Once you have your initial group, it is advisable to call them. During this telephone interview, the basic criteria can be

confirmed, professionals can be weeded out and those that prove they are articulate and creative will be taken forward. Next

comes a face to face meeting where potential co-creators work through a series of exercises to crack a brief. Following this

meeting a final selection of co-creators is made.

Typically, the One per cent-ers will be invited to work in co-creation teams with clients and experts, and asked to take idea

platforms and craft them into fully-formed concepts.

This stage of crafting can take place online or in face-to-face workshops facilitated by the agency. People are split into a

number of small working groups working directly with clients and experts to explore different routes. One per cent-ers are

given regular opportunities to present their ideas, with the first, broader group of customers voting and building on ideas.

CLARIFYING ROLES

The Agency: Agencies are responsible for creating environments both on and offline in which consumers and other

stakeholders feel comfortable to express themselves and to collaborate with each other.

For instance, in a typical agency-created task, each co-creation team is given 50 every day words and asked to generate 50

product/brand benefit statements for a deodorant. This game helps the team start to think about expressing how the

At each stage of the process the agency should be analyzing the dialogue emerging from these exercises to tease out insights

and make recommendations on how to move forward with ideas and concepts.

Experts: Although levels of involvement can vary, experts are typically used in a co-creation project to inspire and curate

ideas, especially in the early stages. They can create presentations to stimulate involvement and provide background

information for co-creation teams. They may also be involved in the co-creation teams themselves, being needed to cluster

ideas together or tweak them into practical concepts.

Clients: Clients are responsible for shaping the specification of the project and for sharing existing knowledge on the brand

and its context. They should identify at the outset their core decision-making team responsible for working directly with

consumers who will take the outputs from the process and drive them through the business.

At each stage the client team should give feedback on any direct interactions with consumers and work with the agency to

Downloaded from warc.com

5

shape the project. Clients also need ensure ideas are aligned with their commercial objectives and will really resonate with

consumers.

CONCLUSION

Consumers' desire to be involved more directly in what a brand does and says means that now more than ever there is a great opportunity to do things with consumers rather than at them.

The world of research needs to embrace this and help brands identify their most knowledgeable and creative customers.

Above all, co-creation requires researchers to see consumers not as passive respondents or as individuals who just want to buy stuff, but as people who want to have active and equal relationships with brands. It is a shift which could give researchers

a more strategic role in clients' businesses.

Further Reading on warc.com:

Case Studies:

Axe Skincare Crowd Innovation: Crowdsourcing and Co-Creating with Axe Consumers Philippa Rose, Andrew Needham, Saul Parker, ESOMAR, Innovate, Barcelona, November 2010

Innovation Detonation @ Deutsche Telekom: Co-Creation Starts in the Living Rooms of our Customers Raimund Schmolze, Annette Boehmer, ESOMAR, Innovate, Barcelona, November 2010

Successful Consumer Co-Creation: The case of Nivea Body Care Volker Bilgram, Michael Bartl and Stefan Biel, Market Research Society, Annual Conference, 2010

How Walkers used co-creation to get the UK to do it a flavour Bridget Angear and Miranda Sambles, Admap, September 2009, Issue 508, pp. 31 33

Articles:

Warc Briefing: Co-creation Warc Exclusive, November 2010

Innovate 2010: a report from ESOMAR's innovation conference Manfred Mareck, Warc Exclusive, November 2010

Co-creation: The live age Mark Tutssel, Admap, December 2010, pp. 24 25

About the authors:

Andrew Needham is CEO & Founding Partner of Face. He has been interested in developing new ways of working with

consumers since the 1990s. He is also the director and group managing director of Cello PLC London Hub, a member of the

Marketing Society and Market Research Society and a regular conference speaker.

www.linkedin.com/in/andrewneedham

Downloaded from warc.com

6

@andrewneedham

Job Muscroft is managing director of Face. Before helping set up Face in 2002, Job spent 15 years working on marketing,

research and innovation for clients such as GSK, News International, Unilever, O2 and Google. He is also the chief operating

officer of Cello PLC London Hub and a member of the Marketing Society and the Market Research Society.

www.linkedin.com/in/jobmuscroft123

@Jobmuscroft

Copyright Warc 2011 Warc Ltd. 85 Newman Street, London, United Kingdom, W1T 3EX Tel: +44 (0)20 7467 8100, Fax: +(0)20 7467 8101 www.warc.com All rights reserved including database rights. This electronic file is for the personal use of authorised users based at the subscribing company's office location. It may not be reproduced, posted on intranets, extranets or the internet, e-mailed, archived or shared electronically either within the purchaser s organisation or externally without express written permission from Warc.

Downloaded from warc.com

7