InSites Blog

Innovations come about in several ways. The innovation process is often powered by technology. In other cases, marketers have sufficient knowledge and intuition to independently create new products. Occasionally, a good innovation is created by accident. Today’s active and empowered consumer is however prepared to innovate in cooperation with brands. Co-creation is the joint creation of innovations by customer and producer with the goal of better meeting customer needs. This is why co-creation is a very valuable, even necessary, supplement within the innovation process.

My Starbucks Idea is a good example of how co-creation based on consumer conversations can support the innovation process of a brand. The platform allows consumers to help think about new products. The ideas are shared with others who can vote for, and discuss, them. Platforms like these provide an open and honest opinion by the target group and demonstrate that the company values the opinions of customers. They do however remain marketing tools. The platform is open to anyone (as far as confidentiality permits) and it remains difficult to assess whether all suggestions should be examined. Companies also often underestimate the workload of such an initiative. Some consumers expect that precisely their idea will enter the market, and do not understand why they get no response, sometimes becoming quite upset. Support is needed in situations like these and this requires resources. The question, therefore, is how to apply ‘reverse engineering’ on My Starbucks Idea and translate it into a systematic and objective market research process of co-creation for innovation. This requires a specific approach with regard to target group and market research process.

Target group
Not every consumer is suitable for co-creation. This is nothing new in itself. Eric von Hippel already formulated the idea of leading edge users back in the 80s. Lead users have the same needs as the rest of the market, but much earlier than anyone else. These users are very interested in finding a solution to their needs. For innovation research, we can best approach consumers who are among the first within a specific product category to try new products and are willing to take a risk doing so. Based on theories from social psychology, the co-creation process of InSites Consulting adds a dimension to the innovation process: social independence versus interpersonal influence. We therefore approach two target groups:

• The socially independent innovators. These customers form their own opinion about an innovation based on their own personal experience, regardless of what is popular in their social context. In evaluating an innovation these consumers mainly consider the functional operation of a product; the social impact they achieve with it is secondary.
• The social influencers (influentials). This group of consumers view innovations from their immediate social environment. Influentials are regarded by their environment as a form of creative experts who easily see the benefits of innovations. Consequently, they are often asked for their opinion about certain innovations and the mainstream market follows them in terms of adoption behaviour. They enjoy being creative with products, they find it important that others approve the innovations they use and proactively talk about innovations. They are more concerned with the concrete benefits of an innovation than the technical features.

Process/method
In terms of research method, co-creation requires a different approach than traditional research. The methods must meet the intrinsic motivation and interest of consumers in a contemporary way. They include tools that allow participants to design and adapt ideas in a concrete manner.

To begin with, the right profiles are recruited: only innovators and influencers are considered. The first group are given access to a closed online platform where they generate ideas on an individual basis. All participants are regarded as “innovation-developers” here. The objective is to search for innovation in a targeted manner with a small group based on previously validated insights.

The second phase is one of cross-pollination. Innovators can evaluate the concept ideas of others, comment on them and in turn be inspired further.
During the third phase, the influentials discuss the ideas generated from a social point of view. They refine the concepts with the purpose of making the innovative concepts relevant, memorable and interesting. The influentials are instructed to adapt the ideas in such a way as to be memorable: they must be simple, credible, unexpected and concrete and contain sufficient emotion for people to talk about them with others. Concepts are also proposed as an endpoint from the perspective of the customer and innovators and influentials have tools available to adapt or tag concepts, or load audio-visual material.

Traditional qualitative techniques are intertwined with ethnographic observation methods and creative exercises throughout all phases to provide context and inspiration. All participants are given a clear briefing on what is and what is not sought as well as insights into previous research. It is of great importance that the end customer actively participates in the research conversation and provides feedback. This increases the involvement of participants and gives a face to the initiators. Our experience shows that such an approach truly works. Recognition is more important to consumers than a financial reward: managing the conversation for innovation is what keeps them going.

Results
Based on the methodology described, InSites Consulting has conducted extensive co-creation projects for Heinz, Kraft and Friesland Campina. That experience has led to the following conclusions:

1. Innovators and influentials are easy to identify for different product categories.
2. Both groups generate more and richer innovative ideas than the average consumer.
3. Besides a reality check, innovators generate other ideas than those developed using other methods (e.g. internally in the company).
4. The ideas developed by innovators are more relevant for the market after they have been reviewed and adapted by influentials.
5. The influentials assess innovations differently and identify innovations that are not recognised by the average consumer, but which do in fact have potential in the market.

Want to find out more about co-creation? Contact one of our experts: Tom De Ruyck, Tom Goderis or Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert

This article is also available in Marketing Driven (attachment of Pub Magazine – edition 24/06/10)

The Marriott Marquis at Times Square, New York was the setting for the annual ARF Re:Think2010 convention. Not completely recovered from the overwhelming and flashing stimuli outside (including the Naked Cowboy), I was mastered by a feeling of vertigo upon my entrance and first elevator ride. I immediately understood why this used to be called the “suicide hotel” and even more so why Marriott put artistic fences to protect people from themselves. Imagine an incident like this hits social media today and you are the marketing manager of Marriott who needs to manage the conversation!

Anyway, check-in and buckle-up for my main take-aways:

Traffic trends
comScore confirmed what we already knew: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rule in social media. While Yahoo! is hanging in there, MSN seems to be losing heavily. And the future is for mobile. It will soon become more important for social networking than fixed access. According to Cisco, video will account for more than 60% of all mobile traffic in the near future. Ouch! That’s going to be painful for bandwidth.
Smartphone apps are also better conveyors of brand messages than any other push channel. Think about Carling’s pint app as the UK’s nr 1 iPhone application. I am sure it is going to be the subject of future research and case studies in Journal of Advertising Research and at ARF conventions.

Forget the click – you have to earn it!
Clicking is still used by many as the main effectiveness kpi for online ad campaigns – but that is the wrong approach, I could not agree with comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. Very few internet users actually click on an ad (according to comScore it is between 0,08 and 0,20% across campaigns and dropping– seems even high to me), but they may more easily engage in site visitation and/or brand search.

Indeed if you manage the conversation you will “earn your media” and can always blend it with traditional online media if you like, Nielsen confirms. Many practitioners are after success in earned media for obvious reasons. It is cheap, fast and holds a long term latency effect in that it spurs organic search. But that is easier said than done and unfortunately there is also a risk spurned media or sustained negativity when you screw up as a brand. The performance of your brand in earned media is a function of brand readiness, agility, advocacy and latency. Nielsen nicely combines this in a blended media score to assess a complete view of ad effectiveness – no thanks Nielsen you “earned” this one .

If you want to earn it and your brand is ready for it, Nielsen advises to offer free product trials and coupons. Yes, you read it right – coupons are back in vogue, but this time mobile, location based and linked into loyalty programs. I would say: add some more engagement and provide utility in general (which is more than coupons only) and then brand it. According to Meteor Solutions and Hill Holiday’s research, “earned media” can power the success of your campaign. It is an important driver for traffic but being on Facebook or Twitter is not enough. The effectiveness of your campaign is a function of what users do with your content rather than what you do with it. Social media are in fact more “social” than they are a medium. So if you want to succeed in social, be social – facilitate and join that conversation!

What does this mean for market research?
From the client side Coca Cola’s VP Marketing Strategy & Insights Stan Sthanunathan pointed a.o. to the fact that we need a different mindset and more innovative approaches. We have been doing too much “rear view” research. Bring it on!
Diane Hessan from Communispace took the researcher perspective with 8 rules for next-generation market research. The most thought provoking ones to me were:

• Go beyond the ad-hoc-ness of research : with the internet you do not need to say goodbye to consumers you can keep on going.
• Cutting edge technology or nice surveys combined with a poor research design, remains poor research.
• Never underestimate the power of n=1 : sometimes the insight is in just that one comment.
• Engagement trumps the sample size: who is in the sample is more important than how many.

The people from IBM and Converseon added a nice example from their end on how we need to mine and monitor the online conversation. Social media netnography based on text mining is for sure a trend for market researchers to follow. But, qualitative researchers do not panic: human analyses are absolutely essential!

Emotional branding
The view and findings on earned media and more connected forms of research, tie in nicely with Marc Gobe’s vision of how social media transform brands. If you want to successfully manage your brand today you need:

1. Real time insights for leadership – stop listening (we have been doing so for the last 30 years) but become part of the conversation
2. Build an eco-system for dialogue
3. Leverage the power of communities – and yes, you will lose control
4. Content is the new social currency – it is viral
5. Leverage the criticism into an opportunity

Oh, and as an aside: “your message has to be tweetable”.

The question still remains though: what makes your online campaign stand out?
Nigel Hollis from Millward Brown provided a nice and crisp analysis of it. First of all, technically none of the ads go really viral – as the pass through ratio is too low.
Nevertheless if there is variation, there are 4 important drivers:

• Awareness (correlation with nr views rv=0,4) – the brand as such offers the promise that the add will be viewed
• Buzz (rv=0,38) – the pass along potential of the add
• Celebrity (rv=0,31) – using celebs works also online
• Distinctiveness (rv=0,46) – people need to be convinced that it is worth watching

Ads with LEGS also overachieve in terms of viral viewing: Laugh out loud, Edgy, Gripping and Sexy.
In conclusion: have your ABCD right and let creativity rule! One of those ads that has it all together is the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE. Admit it you males, you did not like it in the beginning, felt kind of threatened but had a laugh at the end.

Yes, we are homo sapiens (“wise man”) but are much more emotional than we think we are! And that is maybe what I have missed the most as a theme at the conference – emotions for advertising and marketing.

Hope to be back next year with some research of our own!

If you want to check the tweet stream search for #rethink10 – there are quiet some interesting quotes and links.

I attended the IJMR Research Methods Forum ‘Stop asking questions, start listening’. The venue was promising: ‘The Royal Society’. I felt honored to see Isaac Newton’s original manuscript and be at the very place where Darwin introduced his theory of evolution. But quite frankly if I transfer it to observational research as I observed it at the research forum, Darwin’s theory might not hold for observational research!

I somewhat expected to see more state of the art observational and ethnographical studies and methods. Not necessarily much about social media, but how about illustrations of how we can empower participants to provide us with insights we could not get 10-20 years ago. What happens if you give people a camera, if you ask them to record a movie of their behaviors and tag the content or ask a different crowd to interpret the observational reports of other participants or even ethnographers? As Darwin might say, things have evolved. Yet the forum placed a great deal of importance on relatively traditional, old-school techniques. My expectations were not completely met in terms of real contemporary observational research.

Still, as always there was some interesting food for thought. Here are the main take-aways:

Phyllis Macfarlane rightfully pointed out that nowadays more data are available than ever before and that clients review their spending like never before due to the economic downturn. These two ingredients could be a lethal combination for us market researchers.

‘Yes’, there is still a sexy job for the statisticians among us – in the end who is going to analyze all these data – and ‘No’ it is not because there is a lot of data on social media that it is accurate!

Phyllis illustrated a web mining experiment which led her to conclude that:

• opinion leaders are the ones who post more regularly on the web, but they are not necessarily more critical or negative …
• a lot of the sentiment that is expressed online was neutral, so the question remains: what we can do with it?
• the coding needs a lot of human input and it is time consuming and expensive

I would have loved to hear more about it, but Phyllis was right when she said we need more triangulation in the research that we do!

Roy Langmaid gave a traditional but inspiring view on listening for the future in terms of co-creation. We need to work at “relational depth” with participants and therefore need the following core conditions:

• empathy
• an unconditional positive regard for the folks we are working with
• be dependably real or authentic

Due to the myth of the open mind researchers are often hampered in what they should actually observe. Too often we listen to the opinions “about” the participant, not “to” the real opinions as such. We also want ‘the toplines’ right away so we can get to closure and confirmation quickly. But co-creation is not about short term problem solving, it is about “creating possibility”. No one seems to hear the creation in co-creation, actually. The magic of co-creation is not about getting a lot of people together, but about changing the normal and interrupting the existing culture. If we can achieve that, then we have possibility.

“When we want to get real observations we need to observe actual consumers, when they do the things they do at their normal time and place”, said Philly Desai. We should not extract them from their natural and normal context. According to Philly Desai there are 5 areas where ethnography is of interest:

I. Retail navigation
II. Product development
III. Life styles and culture
IV. Urban ethnography
V. Habitual action

Michelle Harrison illustrated that we can use deliberate listening when we have to deal with issues:

• which are characterized by complexity & uncertainty
• that tackle justice or ethics
• which relate to difficult tradeoffs which have to be made
• where true deliberation is needed and a decision has not been made yet

It was hard to find the figurative gorilla and black swan in what Paul Edwards presented. A couple great and appropriate quotes: “Thinking is more interesting than knowing but less interesting than looking” (Goethe); “In the long history of mankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed” (Darwin); “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream” (Muggeridge).
And the future will tell, Paul, if Twitter will last … .

According to Ed Keller’s word of mouth research 76% of it happens offline, 2/3 is positive and it is does have impact! When advertising influences word of mouth than there is 20% more chance that it includes a strong recommendation to buy.

I am still trying to figure out what opinion polls have with observation …

Adam Philips shed some good light on the ethical challenges for observational research. The bottom line is we need to treat people with respect, avoid dubious technology and not use technologies that also serve a marketing purpose. Things have changed! It would not be that easy to take and publish a photo of peeing kids nowadays as it was the case in the mass observation social research in the UK back in 1937. Several people would consider it as inappropriate to picture kids this way …

I am just wondering how far we take this? Are we also not allowed to look at people’s public Facebook page and make some kind of interpretation of it?

All in all, I got some inspiration but my feedback to MRS / IJMR would be simple. As animals and humans are evolving quickly, market research needs to adapt to remain meaningful and prevail. By focusing on that evolution and using it towards our own as well as our clients’ advantage, we can all come out ahead.

While there was not a central theme to the conference it could have been “power to the people”. If one thing was clear it is that research is humanizing or will have to … . Here are a couple of my personal thoughts on a two day conference, as always variable in content and format quality (I just kept some of the best stuff .

Public science. Lord Robert Winston drew the parallel with science having a bad name because of our failure to engage the public. We have lack of interest in nuclear power as an alternative energy source due to the negative communication of the past, whilst it may be a very carbon friendly technology. I personally believe the same may hold for market research. We need to give back to the people who generate insights for us, our participants, to increase their engagement and make research sexier.

Open it up! Especially if we want to get the most out of research communities, we need to move away from “walled gardens” to more open research communities. My personal view goes even one step further. We need to invest in platforms made for and by participants in which we develop long lasting relationships based on intrinsic motivation, rather the arm’s length interactions of single focus groups and web surveys. Using a plethora of research tools, having participants generate their own content and polls (called it the Facebook of research) … these platforms will go to the core of participation and sharing. Social network research platforms will generate a continuous feed and flux of insights, thriving on the trend of lifecaching and opening up opportunities for (n)ethnography.

If we want to manage research communities and social networks effectively we need to:
1. develop shared goals
2. introduce group rewards
3. shape group identity
4. stimulate participants to build a shared place
5. celebrate and allow public recognition

Meanwhile, friends and relationships on social media can be used by brands assess “brand value relationships” – an issue we are convinced of for quite a while at InSites Consulting.

Implicit. Measurement need not only be direct. Biometrics (e.g. heart rate, respiration …) and eye tracking can provide added value for measuring ad engagement next to expert interviews and online surveys. Call it fusing explicit and implicit measurement for better insights. Otherwise, we can also rely on trend analysis and semiotics to generate inspiring insights into the future. For sure we can learn alternatively from bottom-up and outside-in processes – all developments compatible with the venue of social media research platforms.
At InSites Consulting we added another spectrum recently through adding text analytics to discern patterns to existing data by unleashing computer power. The ultimate goal is to unveil information that is hidden for the human eye and you did not realize was even there.

From “done-for” to “done-with”. Charles Leadbeater picked in on day 2 stating that we would grow from a “done-for” to a “done-with” economy for three reasons. First there is the venue of collaborative culture on the web and social technology. Second it will become increasingly important in public services as well as, three, in the innovation and co-creation of physical products. A statement quickly put in perspective as we need to understand the “some”. Co-creation works some of the time, with some people, in some markets and under some conditions

Wrap-up with a good story. As with many things and especially with understanding the world (or at least trying to), things become more acceptable and sticky with a story. Hence not different with research: all research needs to tell a story to inspire and generate impact. In doing so we can rely on citizen journalism, but one needs to especially make sure
- you know what story to tell and a clear structure
- you have the material to understand your audience (in such a way it does not only embellish your findings)
- you play the medium as well as the message

After a lot of serious content, the conference closed with the lively and quite amusing Research X-factor … Quite engaging, creative and funny – hope to see it in Belgium some time.

As every “self-respecting” conference this one also had award nominees of which I am thrilled. Click here to check out why http://www.research-live.com/news_story.aspx?pageid=30&r=y&newsid=6094

Will be back next year!

I was inspired for the above views by Robert Winston (Imperial College London), Ray Poynter (Virtual Surveys), Nick Gadsby (Lawes Consulting), Ian Wright (OTX Europe), Sarah Everitt (Google UK), Rachel Lawes (Lawes Consulting), Charles Leadbeater (Demos and Participle), Sheila Keegan (Campbell Keegan), Andrew Davidson and Graham Saxton (OTX Europe), Lisa Stych (Incite Marketing Planning) and Amanda Boote (Warner Bros). Thanks all!

For comments please contact: niels.schillewaert@insites.eu

Great news! We’ve been accepted to present at the MRS Research 2009 Annual Conference, taking place in London on 24 & 25 March. We will be featuring as one of the Pecha Kucha sessions, bringing day one to a close. For those that don’t know Pecha Kucha, the format is 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, so a presentation of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.  All presentations are addressing the theme “When I run the MR industry….”. It’s fast, it’s a bit scary but we’re very excited! Click here for more information on the conference.