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A. Co-creation 101
Embracing Online Co-creation to Accelerate Marketing and Innovation
Innovation is the key to sustainable growth. It is the primary and increasingly vital source of competitive advantage for businesses in a marketplace that has become exponentially cluttered, complex and dynamic. The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models, said IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano in a recent interview with BusinessWeek on The Worlds Most Innovative Companiesii. While innovation is steadily climbing up every CEOs corporate agenda, so is the realization that ideas alone dont really matter much without the capability to implement the right ones faster than competitors do. And herein lies the problem with innovation as it is practiced today. The BCG annual innovation surveys constantly highlight that senior executives find the current innovation process hard to systemize and frustratingly slowiii. Neville Roberts, enterprise CIO of Best Buy sums up why innovating fast matters in an interview with ZDNet: A lot of our revenues come from innovation, but it gets copied quickly (...) We have to get innovation out there quickly. We have to bring things to fruition quicker than everyone else.iv When the name of the game is to be the first to bring the right innovation to market, co-creation is the solution that numerous companies increasingly turn to. The traditional innovation process is sequential: developing concepts and testing them, mostly internally or with a small network of external agents. It takes up a significant amount of time and has a high failure rate. Consumers are involved at the tail-end, as validators. Co-creation flips the traditional innovation model on its head, turning a sequential process into a parallel one. Co-creation engages consumers directly at the onset of the innovation process to gain fresh, fast and creative ideas that are consumer-rooted, streamlining and compressing a complex chain of ideation-validation steps with multiple stakeholders. When it happens online, it enables simultaneous engagements with a large number of individuals across geographies within a short timeframe. Because co-creation starts with input from end-users, there is less chance that the concepts suggested would not get market acceptance, thus reducing risks of failed projects.
The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.
Peter Drucker, Management Professor, Authori
1. What is Co-creation?
Co-creation projects are a wonderful mix of market research and marketing. Its a virtuous circle whereby the brief fulfills consumers, enabling them to express their creativity, and the brand benefits from content that we can celebrate and gain insights from, and potentially even use as part of our communication materials.
David Skerrett, Head of Social and Mobile, Euro RSCG 4D
C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, co-authors of The Future of Competition: Co-creating unique value with customers, define co-creation as an active, creative and social process based on collaboration between producers and users, initiated by the firm to generate value for customersv. Instead of building for consumers, companies build with them. Co-creation can take many forms: A company can cocreate a new product with a small number of lead users in a lab or crowdsource a problem online to get a large number of individuals working simultaneously to solve it. Co-creation is also simply defined by Doug William, analyst and co-creation expert at Forrester Research, as the act of involving consumers directly, and in some cases repeatedly, in the
product creation or innovation process. Companies engage with consumers on initial product concepts and ideas, and they use consumers as a resource throughout the product development life cycle.vi Online co-creation in particular is gaining traction with businesses. Most of Interbrands 100 Best Global Brands 2011, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Hyundai, Danone, Starbucks and Nike, are already actively using online co-creation platforms and communities to involve consumers directly and repeatedly to infuse their communication and products with fresh ideas, content and solutions.
Fulfilment
Fame Fortune
Fun
1 2 3 4 5
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Customer experience
Be it rewards programs, consumer communication, enhancements in retail channels, or improvements in pre- and post-purchase experiences
Markets
Establishing deeper understanding through innovative insights or exploring opportunities in expanding market size and/or share
Business models
Refining or exploring a total change
One specific benefit stemming from the transformational nature of online co-creation is an opportunity to discover a game changer, which is a radical departure from old business models and strategies, unlocked by consumers but not immediately apparent to a company.
Strategy
Refining or re-defining the entire business approach
Danish toy manufacturer LEGO Group, known for its iconic colorful building blocks, is a perfect example of how co-creation can ripple through the five areas of transformation identified by Ramaswamy and Gouillard to radically reshape the company and its business model. In 2004, the LEGO Group was facing bankruptcy sales declined sharply by 30% in 2003 and the business had been largely unprofitable between 1998 and 2004viii. LEGO already knew that its customers were central to the creation of its products, especially post-purchase when they build LEGO models
their own way or re-use blocks to invent their own. But the company had never placed its customers in the driving seat of its business strategy. LEGOs first foray into creating a more collaborative company started with LEGO Mosaic, an online tool that allowed users to calculate the number of bricks required to make a wall-hanging mosaic of different colors with the photographs that they uploaded on the platform. The success of this project widened LEGOs perspective on the potential of co-creation and soon LEGO Factory, a platform where users can calculate the number of bricks and other components required for their own designs, followed.
Beyond the development of new products or the generation of fresh consumer ideas, online co-creation can also help solve traditional marketing challenges such as branding, positioning or creating unique consumer experiences.
international peer recognition for any aspiring creative. The contest received nearly 2,600 entries (photos, illustrations, animation and videos) in only 12 weeks and the quality was deemed to equal those of professional creative agencies. Leonardo OGrady, ASEAN Director of Integrated
Marketing Communications of Coca-Cola, who commissioned the project, said that the phenomenal response had a ripple effect on the organization in the way we do things, the way we look at accessing creative and fresh ideas.
In a recent project, eYeka worked with a leading FMCG brand to help reposition a yoghurt drink. Consumers were asked to illustrate how they understood a brand promise so as to refresh the brands communication with new creative angles. In addition to identifying creative routes for communication, this seven-week project uncovered a previously overlooked consumer benefit that could have great potential in strategically differentiating the brand from others in the market. This benefit is now a central component of a new brand platform and will form the basis of all new communication worldwide.
An increasing number of companies are beginning to realize that online co-creation enables the innovation process to be faster and more streamlined, thereby increasing chances of delivering the right product or a new communication idea faster than others who are still suck with traditional innovation methods. Online co-creation communities can dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation, bringing down the ideation cycle from months to weeks. Franois Ptavy, Global CEO of eYeka, recently said in an interview with Forrester Researchxv that involving external, creative, decentralized points of view provides clients with consumerrooted collective intelligence, which is now critical as markets become even more globalized and as marketers need to intimately connect to consumers unmet needs, faster than ever.
car manufacturer with a truly co-creative business model. Its first co-created vehicle, the Rally Fighter started off with a car design competition with the winning design voted and refined collectively by a community of enthusiastsxviii. Once the design was adopted, the company accepted pre-orders and invited future owners to watch or participate in the production process at their nearest Local Motors Micro-Factory, which is a local garage or factory that supports the initiative. Customers get the blueprint, the parts and access to an online resource to share assembling tips and troubleshoot potential problems. Through this innovative manufacturing experiment, Rally Fighter owners get a car that is tailored exactly to their needs. The model cuts down on production waste by building only what is necessary and on transportation costs associated with shipping manufactured cars. So far 25 cars have been built and another 120 are scheduled for completion in 2012. Local Motors is now putting a more sophisticated CAD design software online to allow its community to collaborate even deeper in the development of new models, and social network facilities to facilitate exchange of ideas. The company hopes that this new environmentally friendly, sustainable model can become a blueprint for manufacturing in the 21st century.
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Online co-creation allows us to tap into a global group of idea generators, which indeed gives us an outside view on our brands and products. Furthermore it gives us scalability in terms of number of ideas generated in a short period of time.
Bernhard Rber, Innovation Manager, Carlsberg Breweries
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B. Co-creation 102
Get started with online co-creation
Louis Pasteur, the French chemist famously said: Chance favors the prepared mind. The following building blocks of online co-creation programs will help speed up your learning curve on your very first project, or improve existing ones.
You can ask consumers to help identify new trends, new products or new markets. eYeka asked people to explore how we will move in 20 years for an automotive brand or to imagine the future of credit-cards for a large financial brand. If you have identified a market need or a consumer segment that is ripe for innovation, but do not have a product for them yet, or if you have an existing products that could find new usage, you can ask consumers to create a new product for you or innovate an existing one. eYeka recently completed a project to invent a new type of chewing gum for a socially-connected generation Y. The project delivered 80 fresh, creative ideas in three weeks, three of which are now in the companys internal development pipeline.
eYeka has developed a simple framework that identifies four areas on a typical go to market value chain, where online co-creation can add value.
If you are looking to position, or reposition, a product or a brand. Consumers can give creative ideas for packaging, names and brand platforms. eYeka has helped several leading FMCG companies such as Kraft, P&G, Unilever and Danone in gathering faster, fresher ideas to speed up their marketing roll-out. Typical projects include interpreting a brand promise to uncover new consumerled communication angles, injecting premiumness in packaging and creating new retail concepts. Finally, if you are looking for quality consumer-generated content that can connect with consumers, you can ask them to create videos, logos, pictures that can be integrated in your agencys campaigns. With eYeka, Coca-Cola asked consumers to interpret energizing refreshment in their own style and received thousands of videos, animations, pictures from all over the globe. Two of them were subsequently selected to be presented at the 2012 Cannes Festival of Creativity.
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Ideas
Concept
Product
Communication
Xplore
Nvision
Market
Ngage
Product/Service Concepts
Product: eYeNvision Sample challenge to consumers: Invent a healthy, tasty, fun snack for kids!
Communication/ Engagement
Product: eYeNgage Sample challenge to consumers: Show us how BMWs Efficient Dynamics can make the world a better place
When determining what you exactly want to achieve through online co-creation, the major pitfall to avoid is to confuse online co-creation communities with online consumer panels. If a project objective is to gather deep consumer insights about existing products or consumer attitudes towards a concept or a new product, online panels, focus groups and other insight-gathering techniques will deliver better results than co-creation communities. The latter attracts creative participants looking for creative challenges. Their format with a competitive model is best suited to invent new experiences rather than provide consumer insights.
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It is also important to keep expectations in check when it comes to the results of a cocreation project. Submitted entries from consumers are unlikely to be ready for use as marketing collaterals. The essence of cocreation lies with fresh, creative ideas, which will undoubtedly require fine-tuning and validation before any implementation. One company that set the wrong expectations and struggled to manage communication on a co-creation project was Gap, the popular U.S. retail brand. Gap introduced a new logo on its website that prompted some consumer backlash on social media channels. In response, Gap invited its fans to submit their own designs on Facebook but did not provide details as to how the submitted logo would be used (compared to the new one they rolled out) nor did it mention incentives or rewards for participants. This spawned another backlash. To cap it off, Gap pulled the plug on the new logo and its crowdsourcing project, announcing that it will keep its 20-year-old blue box iconic logoxxi.
From this
to this
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When it comes to innovation, all companies need a strong brand champion who knows how to spot great ideas and maximize the potential of each one to turn it into a business-driving solution.
Frederique Covington-Corbett, Asia Pacific Central Marketing Organization Lead, Microsoft
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economic benefits, giving it the motivation to continue the journey and explore more and more strategic applications of co-creation. It is also important to open communication channels such that feedback can flow freely bottom-up and allocate proper resources to look into and act on them.
project must be established. You will need such framework to ensure that you can use the ideas submitted. For every contest, eYeka ensures that the legal framework benefits both the company and the participants for the duration of the contest and also for the potential use of ideas and work generated, over time.
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In short, what matters most in online co-creation contests, designed to collect fresh and original ideas, are the level of creativity of the participants and the extent to which they can illustrate their creativity. Representative participants will give representative answers. Creative participants will give creative answers.
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1% Creative Consumers
9% Enthusiasts
90% Spectators
eYeka segments consumers into a ratio of 90:9:1 a concept first introduced by Jakob Nielsen, principal and cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Groupxxiv.
90% of consumers are deemed spectators. They read or watch but do not contribute. They are good at talking about their experience with products and identify problems. This is the group traditionally involved in focus groups or consumer research. 9% of consumers are termed enthusiasts who actively view, share content and interesting ideas, yet do not create from scratch. The remaining 1% is what eYeka calls creative consumers. They form the basis of eYekas community. They have superior creative thinking capability and create content actively of which the remaining 99% view and share. Creative consumers are a bit like creative directors in an advertising agency. They are not necessarily representative of a target audience of a given brand they are working on, but they have the ability to come up with innovative solutions and messages that will resonate with them. Like with creative directors, creative consumers ideas should be tested with target consumers. Brands can tap into different segments of consumers for different purposes. The 1% of creative consumers is ideal for generating novel ideas and creating original content, the 9% of enthusiasts play an important role in refining and spreading them, while the 90% of spectators validate and will ultimately purchase the resulting products.
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tend to attract this 1% of consumers who are most creative and are therefore well suited for ideation projects, applicable from blue-ocean thinking to brand positioning or packaging challenges. Online co-creation communities like eYeka comprise of an existing network of consumers and experts who have specifically signed-up to participate in co-creation projects. By being open to everyone and by letting people join co-creations contests freely, eYeka has buildup a bank of creative participants who participate as soon as they are interested in the topic and have ideas to contribute. These online communities operate on a competition model, with limited prizes available for winners only. As highlighted by the works of London Business School Professor Kevin J. Boudreau and Harvard Business School Professor Karim R. Lakhanixxv, a competition model encourages the submission of disruptive, out-of-the-norm ideas, as there is no need to build on cumulative knowledge or past experiences, or to form a consensus. On eYeka, community members choose which projects they want to participate in. This ensures that they are self-motivated to contribute ideas and have a degree of appreciation for the brand. Unlike participants being screened before they can join a focus group, eYeka
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does not impose filters or musthave characteristics to join a competition. The diversity of participants, backgrounds and opinions provides a higher chance of getting decentralised, refreshing interpretations and solutions to creative challenges. A recent example from eYeka involves a young British man who has never been to India but nevertheless created a TV spot concept that scored highest when tested with Indian consumers. This participant was a complete outlier among others who mostly stemmed from the subcontinent. The TV spot was later adopted to front a nationwide campaign for the launch of a new product. Allowing for diversity in co-creation contests also helps discover blind spots. These would be existing issues or concerns that internal staff or even a small representative segment of a target audience did not see or address prior to the cocreation project. Competition is the first stage in the ideation process, similar to a brainstorm where participants first throw in their own ideas. The second stage is to select and consolidate the best ideas to make them even better. This is where a collaboration model works best; when participants are invited to view concepts, rate them and comment on them. Here the natural tendency from participants will be a normalization of opinions, to reach a consensus.
3.2.2 Engage with your consumers on dedicated platforms for insights, idea consolidation
You will need to build or use dedicated platforms to engage your regular stakeholders in a co-creation process, be it your customers, employees, partners or suppliers. An example of such an application would be Starbuckss online platform, MyStarbucksIdea. com where consumers are invited to contribute their ideas to improve the Starbucks experience and rate those that have already been published. These platforms largely attract brand enthusiasts (9%) and spectators (90%), which make them the ideal place to gather insights on what consumers want and consolidate ideas and concepts that were inspired and adapted from creative consumers (1%) at the ideation stage. With over 75,000 ideas and 750,000 votes generated (and counting), MyStarbucksIdea.com has become an ideal real-time insights lab, allowing the company to keep in touch with what consumers need and want, test products and constantly improve its experience.
The diversity of participants, backgrounds and opinions provides a higher chance of getting decentralised, refreshing interpretations and solutions to creative challenges.
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It is important to remember that creative consumers are also end-users: they have a lot of imagination, but their ideas are quite implementable.
Deborah Beddok, Product Manager, SFR
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Conclusion
Online co-creation contests can accelerate the way your business innovates, shortening marketing and innovation cycles from months to weeks with creative, consumer-rooted ideas that can potentially deliver the next game-changer for your industry. As with all creative processes involving consumers, the results are never guaranteed. But in todays highly kinetic competitive environment, the cost of inaction is greater. Leading global brands are already co-creating with eYeka. Contact the world market leader in online co-creation today to see how you can tap into the collective creative power of the largest community of creative consumers.
Authors
Franois Ptavy, Jol Cr, Christine Tan, Yannig Roth
The authors would like to extend their heartfelt appreciation to the following for their contribution in co-creating this white paper: Bernard Cova, French Academic and forward-thinking researcher in the field of marketing Bernhard Rber, Innovation Manager, Carlsberg Breweries C.K. Prahalad, co-author of The Future of Competition: Co-creating unique value with customers David Skerrett, Head of Social and Mobile, Euro RSCG 4D Doug Williams, analyst and co-creation expert at Forrester Research Eric Vernette, Professor of Marketing at the University of Toulouse and Chair of the Center for Management Research Francis Gouillart, Co-Author of The Power of Co-Creation Frederique Covington-Corbett, Asia Pacific Central Marketing Organization Lead, Microsoft Gaurav Bhalla, CEO of Knowledge Kinetics, Chief Innovation Officer at Passenger and author of Collaboration and CoCreation, New Platforms for Marketing Innovation Jean-Fabrice Lebraty, Author and Professor at the Universit Lyon 3 Paul Sloane, Author of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Leonardo OGrady, ASEAN Director of Integrated Marketing Communications of Coca-Cola Venkat Ramaswamy, cofounder of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership and co-author of The Power of Co-Creation
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About eYeka
eYeka is the global market leader in online consumer co-creation. We are an online community of about 200,000 members from more than 94 countries. Our community attracts the most creative consumers, among the 1% of content creators on the web to participate in creative challenge for brands. We leverage our community of creative consumers to help companies generate creative insights, unlock innovation opportunities and drive consumer engagement at a global level in a matter of weeks and within a confidential, IP protected environment. To date, eYeka has worked with 40 out of the top 100 leading global brands (according to Interbrands 2011 ranking) such as Procter & Gamble, LOreal, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, Hyundai, Diageo and Microsoft.
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