For several years, co-creation has taken an increasing place in the innovation strategy of companies. If this co-creation gives a unique place to the consumer, useful for brands, its implementation via online communities is not without meeting certain limits when tested by the facts. How to get the most out of this co-creation?
Co-creation in question
Co-creation is a common approach to innovation between a brand and its customers/consumers. It can be applied to different issues, including: product and service innovation or communication. The establishment of such a brand-consumer dialogue is of course not new; market studies have long already enabled such an approach thanks in particular to creative techniques which bring together “expert consumers” aware of creative techniques and product managers.
With online creative communities, co-creation allows for a much more fluid dialogue. In fact, we have better access to the target we wish to associate with the approach:
Although the richness of such an online community approach no longer needs to be demonstrated, there is nevertheless a major pitfall for the marketer to face: when it comes to product or service innovation avenues, the material collected from the community is often disorganized, poorly structured, and often takes the form of a huge, somewhat “junk” idea box.
The problem and the limits
Unfortunately, even if new players in the field of marketing services offer recruitment, community animation and the interface allowing dialogue with these creative consumers, the creative discipline and structuring of the material obtained is rarely there. It is therefore often a posteriori that brands must recover the large mass of innovative contributions from consumers in order to try to provide a certain strategic clarity, because it is rare that these contributions contain directly usable consumer insights.
Uncover the right insights
An exploitable insight, from the perspective of product and service innovation, must include at least three components: address an identified need, support this need with an illustration or a concrete real-life case, indicate the constraint, the obstacle which causes the situation described to lead to a blocking situation giving rise to consumer frustration or an unfulfilled desire.From this frustration in satisfying a real need arises a tension that the marketer will endeavor to resolve through a product and service offer.
Thus, the material collected within creative communities with a view to product or service innovation should for each of them make it possible to identify insights that can be directly exploited on a marketing level because the product concept that we can imagine will have to resolve a real tension (health vs. time). As we have pointed out, it is unfortunately rare to obtain structured information in this usable format at the end of the period of animation of a creative community.
Towards better structuring of the insights collected
The key therefore lies in the ability, during animation, to structure this information. If today the animation exercise remains focused on the transmission of stimuli and the collection of creative ideas, tomorrow the suppliers of this type of service will have to increase their skills and know how to structure this information as early as possible in the creative chain so as not to transfer most of this work to their clients: the brands. The same goes for conversational and co-creative platforms as for any information system or database: poorly structured mass information quickly becomes unusable.
The structuring of this information at the same time as the phase of its collection requires “facilitation guides” designed for this purpose which will have to be better marked in the future. But, of course, we must ensure that the structuring of this information is not done to the detriment of creativity itself. We therefore recommend proceeding in two stages.
See our insight-crafter approach which allows the search for insights to be structured from the outset as part of an online co-creative dialogue with consumers.