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)

Mid-September ESOMAR organizes their general Congress in Greece, Athens. The Congress theme is fully focused on the changing landscape in market research ‘Odyssey 2010 – the changing face of market research‘. The face of market research is changing and with it so are many of the approaches and methodologies we employ.

The R&D department at InSites Consulting continuously works on co-creating research solutions together with clients, suppliers, academics, consumers, and professional organizations. Probably one of the reasons we’ll be well-presented at this year’s general Congress.

First up are Annelies Verhaeghe and Niels Schillewaert on 13 September: User Generated Content and Research. While consumers participate less in traditional surveys, they generate more information than ever before. Consumers cache their lives online and are ubiquitously available via mobile devices. As researchers we have the chance now more than ever to fuse methods and generate more insights without actually asking questions. By observing consumers’ actions, becoming friends online, scraping publically available content and text-analyzing it, getting physiological measures like reaction times and mouse clicks we can come to a more full understanding of consumers through these neo-observational research.

On 14 September Tom De Ruyck and Annelies Verhaeghe will co-present ‘Exploring the world of water‘ with Michel Rogeaux of Danone Global R&D. A case on fusing contemporary research methods.

Joeri Van den Bergh will also attend the Congress, hopefully the collect an award for his paper on authenticity. And finally on 15 September Niels Schillewaert is one the chairmen.

Interested to attend the Congress? Sign up online!

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.

The Big Apple was the place for the 2010 ESOMAR Health Conference. During the breaks the appropriate amounts fresh fruits (not including apples though) and herb teas were served. Obviously in the evenings, NY’s recommended restaurants easily made up for this with copious meals and – for some – more BMI-threatening dishes. Honestly, I was actually a bit shocked by the ‘size’ of some health marketers and researchers alike attending this health conference…

In the introduction Finn Raben, the new quick-witted ESOMAR Director General (male, Irish, and not to be mistaken for a cop – US practical joke) revealed that Health Research now accounts for 12% of the total market research investments. The big chunk of this budget is spent on research among health care professionals. Today’s biggest challenge for pharma and health providers is that care is moving out from the clinical environment into patients’ and consumers’ homes, their PCs, their mobile phones… and health research is bound to move there as well.

Rod Falcon, first and most inspiring keynote (Institute for the Future, USA), anticipates that we will soon be tracking people’s moods and biometrics to better understand their medical condition and needs. Reasonably it will take some more time before we all start measuring our blood pressure daily (although my 81-year old grandfather already does!) and upload it online. However, already today user-generated health information can no longer be ignored by the health industry and its research providers.

We may indeed be a couple of years apart from massively uploading proper biometrical data; we already post huge amounts of health conversations online and we do this at critical moments (e.g. when we experience unusual symptoms, when we receive a new diagnosis, after an attack, after a prescription change…). This content is freely available for us, health researchers, to analyze and better understand health management in this new empowered society where patients demand involvement and want to understand more about their (family members’) disorders, diagnoses, and treatment options.

When scraping, analyzing, or tracking their online conversations about illnesses, HCP relations and product use, pharmaceutical companies (including the research agencies that do this on their behalf) obviously have both legal and ethical obligations to report and act upon irregularities such as drugs’ adverse effects. Mind you, this is by far the most obvious reason for many actors not (yet) to engage in observational research online. Other reasons include ‘no interest in patient research whatsoever’ (how much longer can this be justified?) and ‘having no idea about the current research possibilities’ (the conference was a good step forward closing this knowledge gap).

Merz Pharmaceuticals (and The Third Eye) and UCB Pharma (together with Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert from InSites Consulting) – first movers to engage in ‘social media netnography research’ in the industry, put their best feet forward on stage to overcome the existing knowledge barrier. With a lot of passion and practical examples they explained how they embraced the insights gathered on social media content and put it to practice in their organizations.

Questions received about the ethics of such ‘big brother’ practices were confidently bounced back to the audience by Rudi Van Campenhout (UCB) and the Merz team: ‘Is it maybe more ethical to know that a lot of questions and frustrations are out there about our brands and products and to just shut our eyes to them? Isn’t it more human to start listening (obviously only on freely accessible platforms!) to understand how we can act upon this in the future?’

Clearly some people in the room remained in doubt (because personally they have never engaged in online conversations about their overweight, cholesterol levels, restless leg, cardiac arrhythmia, hair loss, pregnancy, impaired vision… online? Or because regulatory and pharmaco-vigilance seems barriers too difficult to take?). But fact that our Health 2.0 paper – Social Media as the Central Nervous System for Learning about Epilepsy – received one out of two conference nominations for the ESOMAR Health Excellence Award shows that many minds were opened to these new views!

I would like to end with a quote by Rudi Van Campenhout for the sceptics: ‘I mean it if I say that the Web 2.0 journey was not only insightful, but also very fun (…) it also gave me the opportunity to get to know ESOMAR as an organization and I really liked it.’

Also our Young Research of the Year Annelies Verhaeghe – we also tend to call her our World Champion Research in the category -30 (in years and in BMI), shined on stage presenting her award-winning paper “And they lived happily ever after… – Analyzing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality-of-life.’ Still not convinced? Just read it!

At the 2009 ESOMAR Congress, ESOMAR cooperated with John Kearon of BrainJuicer to produce interviews with industry thought leaders to discuss the future of Market Research and attracting talent to our industry. One of the interviewees was Tom De Ruyck, Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant at InSites Consulting.

In this mini-documentary he asks participant’s at ESOMAR’s 2010 Congress their vision on research in the year 2019.

In this interview he speaks with participant’s at ESOMAR’s 2009 Congress about stimulating and training young recruits in the market research industry.

Yesterday evening MRS celebrated the best in the research industry at the Research Awards 2009 in London. InSites Consulting was nominated for 2 awards

• IJMR Collaborative Research Award for Join the research: participant-led open-ended questions by Annelies Verhaeghe, Niels Schillewaert & Tom De Ruyck
• Best Conference Presentation for the Pecha Kucha session of Niels Schillewaert.

Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner at InSites Consulting was the lucky one to bring home the Best Conference Presentation Award 2009 for his Pecha Kuch session at the Research 2009 Conference.

What the judges said:

A riveting, bravura performance. Seamlessly supported by 20 brilliant slides, Niels took only 6 minutes 40 seconds to communicate his cogently argued view of ‘creative destruction’ as an inevitable, but exciting, future for Market Research. His presentation neatly encapsulated all the main themes of the 2009 Conference, including (quite masterly) storytelling.

The full program of the ESOMAR Global Healthcare Conference is final and InSites Consulting is chosen to present not less than two cases.

On Monday 1 March 2010, Annelies Verhaeghe (ESOMAR Young researcher of 2009) will present ‘And they lived happily ever after…‘. Her award-winning paper on analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality of life.

The same day Niels Schillewaert will co-present with Hans Schmeits and Rudi Van Campenhout of UCB Pharma. Health 2.0, social media as the central nervous system for learning about epilepsy.

Find out more about the conference here.

Web 2.0 platforms, social networks, online communities and mobile research are rapidly entering the marketing research landscape. In response to this media evolution ESOMAR has expanded their former Panel Research Conference to tackle these new technologies and the social environments they create, introducing the ESOMAR Online Research Conference.

Yesterday Annelies Verhaeghe, ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year co-presented our paper on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’ with Dutch broadcaster RTL. A case on the evaluation of a TV programme based on social media. The paper will be online soon!

For more information, contact Annelies Verhaeghe.

Tom De Ruyck is Senior ForwaR&D Lab Consultant at InSites Consulting

What’s the new ‘buzz word’ in your domain? What does it mean and what do we do with it?

Online Research Communities are definitely the hottest topic in market research today. No self-respecting conference is complete without at least a session devoted to research communities. Blending the authentic voice of the consumer with great ROI, online communities are providing a new way for brands and organizations to get in touch with their customers.

Online research communities come in many forms, from closed to open, from short-term to ongoing, from branded to themed,… In most cases research methods are fused to gain rich consumer insights: polls and surveys, forum and chat discussions, besides a broad range of techniques to observe consumers’ online and offline behavior.

We are investing a lot of time and effort in this area. In close collaboration with Stephan Ludwig, the PhD student we sponsor at the University of Maastricht, my colleague Dado and I are constantly optimizing our community research approach in order to provide our clients with fresh insights and to get the maximum out of their research budgets.

What are you most proud of?

I am particularly proud of how we – over the past 2 years – have integrated the power of social media into both our marketing thinking and our way of conducting market(ing) research studies. The latest by developing a whole portfolio of new methods and techniques ranging from ‘Online Discussion Groups’ and ‘Research Communities’ over ‘User-Created Brainstorms’ and ‘Post-its’ to ‘Social Media Netnography’ and ‘Multimedia Ethnography’. It is just great to be part of our FowaR&D Lab team that is responsible for most of the research behind all of this!

What do you want to warn marketers/market researchers about, now and in the future?

The context in which we life has changed drastically over the past 5 years due to the revolution taken place on the web. Today’s consumers are empowered and smarter than ever! They literally have the ability to make or break brands. On the other hand, they are willing to give companies a lot of feedback and they even want to co-create new products and services with them (according to the 2009 edition of InSites’ MC DC). This is an opportunity for smart companies: listen to your consumers, get a dialogue with them, understand the issues they are dealing with and eventually co-create products, advertising and branding campaigns with them!

Secondly, I believe that also research agencies have to change the way they are interacting with people: their research participants. If we keep on doing research like most of us do it today, we will have serious difficulties to find people who are willing to fill out surveys that are too long and contain the same old questions over and over again. We have to connect with our participants, give them enough feedback and respect! Ultimately, we need to make our research an experience they can’t resist.

What has surprised you lately?
Last month, BAQMaR – the Belgian association of researchers were I am steering committee member of – was nominated for an ESOMAR award. It shows that the Belgian research scene is more vibrant than ever and that marketing research can be COOL, both as an industry and a profession!

What did your morning look like today?
I am leaving for a holiday of 3 weeks through the country side of Croatia (J), so I am finishing-up the last bits of some of my projects…

Let’s end with a ‘quote of the day’!
“Beta is a state of mind!”
Looking at the speed of change within our industry this has to be(come) the motto of every market researcher! The biggest changes and challenges are still lying in front of us. The best is yet to come and it is the task of our R&D department to get the most out of it for market research purposes in order to help our clients to connect with their customers in the best possible way.

Contact Tom De Ruyck
E-mail: tom.deruyck@insites.eu / Phone number: (+32) 9 269 14 07
Follow Tom’s updates on Twitter: @tomderuyck

If you’re involved in retailing right now you’re probably trying to figure out how to turn a tight marketing budget into sustainable success. A visit to Retailday at the Kinepolis in Brussels on Thursday 24 September could give you the help you need.

The Retailday will feature talks by industry leaders giving you a practical understanding of

• how the market is doing now and what the future holds
• how to increase the efficiency of your marketing while still achieving your sales targets
• how much retailing now happens online
• why service remains essential but can still be kept affordable
• the growing importance of integrated technologies in shops
• and the most important question of all: How do you do all these thing in practice?

Our own Managing Partner Christophe Vergult and Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior Consultant ForwaR&D Lab, will be presenting ‘At your Service‘, the results of a study among Belgian consumers and how they’re experiencing shops and retailing in the downturn.

Check out the full program and sign up online.