Co-Creation, a new Business Strategy
Co-Creation, a new Business Strategy
1. Co…Er, What Sorry?
Co-Creation. Essentially collaborating with your customers to solve problems and develop ideas via a unified perspective and approach. It often involves customers/ consumers working directly with a client organisation to define and create anything from its business strategy and communications to products and even experiences.
Consumers are often experts in their own right, whether the tech addict helping generate new mobile applications or the housewife helping repositioning a globally renowned air freshener. Whatever their background or particular expertise, Co-Creation is about approaching them as equals and partners in the creation process.
2. Sounds a bit free-form and risky…
Not at all. Co-creation isn’t about handing over complete control to ‘the crowd’ (although crowd-sourcing and harnessing crowd wisdom is often one stage in the process) but a model of open invitation. The Co-Creation process can span many disiplines and backgrounds with ideas generated and validated by producers and consumers together.
Working co-creatively means interacting constructively with your audience to generate ideas together not just listening to their opinions via the classic stimulas/ response model that dominates the market research industry. It’s about translating business language into everyday words helping to evole concepts into more lifelike entities.
3. Ok but why not “Co” create and why now?
The interest in Co-Creation has ramped in line with the recent dramatic changes across the communication landscape. Alongside the evolution of the Internet it’s near-impossible to overestimate social media’s influence in empowering consumers.
Not just in voicing their opinions, but in creating and distributing their own content and as active stakeholders ub the brands they consume, in setting a new agenda for producer-consumer relationships.
In many ways the advent of Co-Creation is a corollary of these developments.
Social media has created a real-time collective mind where people are becoming used to on-going interactions (not campaigns), immediately (not asynchronous responses) and closeness (not ivory tower distance) to the brands they admire.
That’s forcing businesses to switch open and collaborative approaches where they have to listen, engage, and collaborate with their audience with their audiences in shaping what they do in order to stay relevant.
Brands have always placed great store in listening to their customers, but in the current economic climate staying close and staying constantly close has become more important that ever.
4. Ok so how’s it done?
There are many different approaches but the heart of the model we’ve adopted at Face is typically a face-to-face workshop. The ideal involves a multi-staged approach incorporating insight generation/ opportunity shaping, ideation, validation, and refinement. We often talk about reversing the research funnel starting by consulting the crowd, moving on to work with defined online communities, then collaborating with an intimate group of co-creators.
5. The exploration and crowd-sourcing phase
Using social media monitoring, we scan the public social Internet to derive insight around a particular brand, category, occasion, need state, or demographic. We then analyse this content and use the resulting insights to define a research agenda to take into a crowd-sourcing phase.
Harnessing the wisdom of the crowd helps drill down further into these insights. Crowd-sourcing can be used to uncover problems and divine top-line solutions to a particular issue. This phase is also useful in quantifying opinions and issues; to ask qualitative questions of quantitative samples.
A second stage typically involves convening a bespoke online project community to explore any hunches, hypotheses, and issues in greater depth.
6. The Co-Creation phase
As outlined above, the Co-Creation phase brings together the professionals and consumers to brainstorm and problem solve, capitalising, developing and building upon the insights, understanding (and potentially the initial solutions) derived in the initial stage to produce “worked up” solutions.
Encouraging creative thinking and ideas in people who might not ordinarily consider themselves “creative thinkers” is something of an art, honed by carefully structuring and facilitating both the workshops and the wider process. Everything must be fine-tuned to make the face-to-face part as effective as possible.
7. The Validation phase
Where time and budget allow we advocate taking workshop outputs back online for further refinement and validation.
One invaluable aspect of Co-Creation outputs is the fact
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