With increasing pressure on budgets as a result of the deteriorating economic climate, brands are forced to look for new more cost effective solutions to age-old problems. This presentation will demonstrate how a combination of crowd-sourcing and on-line co-creation techniques helped Unilever find a breakthrough solution in a more cost effective manner to a challenging global innovation project conducted across multiple countries. Crowd-sourcing and co-creation when used together as part of a well-defined open innovation model can deliver outstanding results for less money.
Many brands over the years have talked the talk in terms of being a customer driven organisations, but this has often meant little more than brand teams attending a few customer immersion sessions and testing a few ideas in focus groups and through surveys. The first half of the presentation will demonstrate the importance of approaching your customers in a different way in order to co-create better insights. In particular it will focus on how co-creation fits into a whole new way of thinking about your customers and how they engage with your business. The second half of the presentation will involve the delegates in a crowd sourcing exercise that builds on the theme of the democratisation of insights and ideas by communities. Delegates in groups will decide on the 3 best insights and the 3 best ideas this has stimulated for their business which they have gathered from the conference and present them to everyone - then all together as the Esomar community we will rank the top 3 overall.
With the advent of Web 2.0, the belief that 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 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.