Digital technology radically changes the way we build and communicate knowledge. The old pattern of centralized senders and massive receivers is no longer acceptable: 'truth' is the consensus of many opinions, with human knowledge following wikipedia rules of collective construction. Since brands are built out of perceptions, their planners have to genuinely engage the way Millennials (those born after the 1980s) think and feel. The Collaboration Panel is an effort to educate corporations on how to interact with this new world, where brands have become the collective result of interactions between consumers, and corporations can no longer be dictators.
Developing innovative products and creating different ideas has never been a problem for Unilever. The company spent years and years investing in internal techniques and processes to ensure the development of innovative products for the marketplace. The aim of each launch is always to anticipate trends, or at least keep up with them, since most project development begins two years before their launch. However, testing innovation has always been a problem. Very bold, innovative ideas or ideas that did not make an immediate consumer need explicit were usually rejected, often not because they were irrelevant or uninteresting, but for the simple reason that the consumer was not ready to absorb the information at that time, or because of the language, which was often not the most appropriate or the clearest to explain a given idea.Some alternative techniques were tested for a long time, yet none managed to get beyond evaluating proposed material. More than simply checking whether the idea worked or not, we needed a technique that would build on the ideas with most potential, giving us indications as to how to work them so that they would be more appealing for a launch.It was at that point that Unilever contacted Box 1824, an agency that worked with a different proposition of market segmentation, which directly impacted the evaluation of innovation.