The pressure is on
The "co-creation revolution"
Ana CM MedeirosAndrew Needham
Abstract
With the advent of Web 2.0, the belief consumers now have in their own voice, in their own creativity and in their own ability to express themselves is becoming more apparent. They clearly no longer see themselves as just passive respondents in their relationship with our brands but active “equals” who have the confidence to come into our space and “play” whether we have invited them to or not. Rather than shy away from this desire for our customers to engage with us we have embraced it with “Co-creation”.
Our presentation will cover the following main topic areas:
- What is co-creation; why is it here to stay and its relationship with market research
- How co-creation goes beyond just generating insights & concepts to innovating new products/new product variants, the big idea and activation plans
- How co-creation can be “open” involving 10% of your customers or “intimate” involving just 1%
- The process of co-creation – how it works and why it can work well
- Co-creating “on-line” or “off line” – the benefits of both approaches
- How Unilever is incorporating co-creation within its innovation process
- Axe Co-creation Case Studies – how co-creation has been applied to the Axe brand both in terms of new product development and activation
Our approach to co-creating with consumers on some of our major brands and the results they have produced will be of interest to FMCG companies because it shows not only consumers have a significant role to play in the “innovation” process but also points the way to how it can be done effectively. Most innovation and new product development cycles are not able to generate enough quality ideas, quickly enough and our co-creation programmes have gone some way to address this.
Ana CM Medeiros
Ana CM Medeiros has been working in Unilever for 13 years, 10 of them in Marketing Research.
She has graduated in chemistry and has completed her MBA in Marketing in 2002.
She was based in Brazil previously but in the last 2 years she has been living in London running both regional and global studies. She has worked with most of the categories in Unilever like Laundry, Fabric Conditioners, Personal Wash and Deodorant and consequently with big brands like OMO / Persil, Comfort /Snuggle , Rexona / Sure among other and currently she is working with Axe/ Lynx .
Andrew Needham
Andrew set up his first business Student Pages while studying at Edinburgh University from 1998-1992. Student pages was the first and only A-Z 'yellow pages' style telephone directory filled with hundreds of discount vouchers covering every major student town in the UK. Andrew successfully sold the business together with Student Marketing, its sister company to The Daily Mail Group in 2001. He then set up Face in 2003 which specializes in bringing together brands and young consumers (aged 12-35) to co-create insights, ideas and advocacy.
By placing a much greater emphasis on audience led marketing, Face has developed a range of innovative and unique research, co-creation and word of mouth marketing techniques. Last year, Face launched www.headbox.com, a place for communities ranging from 'teens' to 'extended youth' to share their creativity, ideas and opinions and get rewarded for them.
Headbox allows clients to harness the opinions, creativity and activity of its 30,000 consumers by hiring them throughout the entire marketing process - to listen, collaborate and co-create with them in order to innovate and accelerate word of mouth.
Andrew is a member of the Marketing Society and a Governing Council Member of the WOM (Word of Mouth) UK Association, he also is a regular panel speaker at insight, co-creation and word of mouth conferences and contributes often to the research and marketing press.
Face has recently become part of Cello Plc Group. Cello is a market research and consulting group with an annualised turnover in excess of £100m, operating income of over £55m and employs approximately 650 employees across well known companies such as 2CV, Leapfrog, TVE, Leith and Farm.
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