Bron facegroup

http://www.facegroup.co.uk/what-we-do

What We Do

Face uses co creation to enable the direct and active involvement of consumers with brands to deliver a range of insight, strategy, innovation and planning objectives.

We have 3 dedicated teams of planners, researchers, and social media specialists based in our London office.

Our Philosophy

We have a fundamentally different way of looking at consumers: We believe that they should be treated as active equals rather than as passive respondents in the brand marketing process. By giving consumers more active and direct responsibility in our research, innovation and planning approach we are able to help brands stay much closer to their consumers ever changing needs. It also means we are able to create better insights, product ideas and social media strategies; dramatically speed up the innovation process and radically reduce the cost of new product development .

Er zijn drie onderdelen van de facegroup:

1. Face Insight

The Face Insight team has one simple mission – to bring our clients much closer to their consumers and their ever changing needs. With our belief in co-creation we have pioneered an integrated approach of on-line and off-line qualitative techniques that enable clients to work more directly and immediately with their consumers wherever they are in the world.

Research principles

We are guided by five key research principles:

1. Taking a consumer-centric approach to finding the right people to work with on projects. Approach consumers as active participants rather than passive respondents in the research process.

2. Step back as researchers – seeing your role more as facilitators and observers; listening, guiding and interpreting rather than believing that we can own and control insight. We see the research process as a partnership between brands, researchers and consumers – triangular, aligned and proactive, not linear and reactive.

3. Enable research participants to interact both freely with one another and directly with clients. Using a combination of on-line research communities and co-creation tools we empower consumers to talk to one another and client stakeholders directly; starting and continuing natural conversations that give the research process a true sense of discovery and excitement.

4. Build projects that allow researchers and brands to develop a continuous, relationship with participants over a period of time

5. Encourage an open source mentality within your company

2. Face Wired

Face Wired is our social media strategy and planning department. We help brands to listen, understand and engage in conversations in social media and co-create activation planning.

We are different from other digital marketing and social media businesses out there for 5 reasons:

1. We make social media simple – we don’t over intellectualise or bamboozle you with techie jargon you don’t understand
2. Social media is about people – our unique social media planning process involves “real people” – your consumers as active equals
3. We are neutral – we don’t have an agenda that involves trying to sell you a website; a widget or any other piece of kit that costs money
4. With the help of our social media specialists and consultants we make sure that the strategy we have developed with you and your consumers is implemented properly
5. We train and educate you so that you are able to devise, manage and execute your own social media strategies effectively once we have gone.

We have a simple 3 step social media planning process:

Listen
People are talking about brands at all hours of every day, in countless forms of social media. We help you listen, map and analyse these conversations. This is the social media immersion stage where we use Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring technology, to map and analyze the buzz about the brand, chart the topics, the issues and the perceptions associated with the brand and identify the influencers that are driving the conversations and that we should involve in the co-creation process.

Plan
We put people at the heart of our process by involving the target audience throughout our social media planning process via Crowd-sourcing and Co-creation tasks. A set of online crowd-sourcing tasks helps us defining the agenda and generating the initial concepts. The most interesting and popular ones are then taken to a smaller sample and a set of co-creation tasks, online and offline, allow us to build on the initial concepts, further develop them and finalize the outputs.

Co-creating activation planning concepts with users, experts and client stakeholders using a mix of on-line and workshop ideation creates robust strategies that users will engage with and more importantly want to consume and share.

Engage
Once we have co-created the strategy Face then work closely with the brand to make sure the strategy is implemented correctly or to directly manage the execution. We then train the brand team so they have the skills to manage social media engagement with communities once we have gone.

3. Face Innovation

By starting broad and encouraging creativity through our specially designed co-creation exercises, consumers are able to identify a huge number of ideas as part of our process. The huge number of initial ideas are then fed through an iterative process of refinement to ensure delivery of robust and differentiating concepts.

Ideas are co-selected along the way with consumers themselves repeatedly clustering, combining and voting on ideas so you ensure that you are creating concepts that are both well thought through and appealing to the people that will actually buy them in the market.

The Innovation team believe in co-creation – clients, agency people and our specialist planners creating with consumers, as equals, to develop better brand strategy, products and communications

We recruit a very specific type of consumer to be involved in our co creation process – we call them “the adfluentials”. They are the 1% of leading edge consumers who are creative, brand savvy, and influential. By involving these consumers (many of whom are already profiled in our communities) we create better ideas, dramatically speed up the innovation process and radically reduce the cost of new product development. Our process enables us to generate a huge numbers of ideas that we can then quickly develop into fully formed products or communications ready for market.

Our planning process is tailored to meet your specific brief but there are 5 clear steps: Download, Explore, Co-Create, Refine and Advance. The diagram below visualises these steps:

Actie reactie en reactie..

• Op het debat over co-creation worden door de online mogelijkheden ook direct reaties geplaats en daar wordt weer op gereageerd. Met als uitkomst: een poel van meningen, visies en informatie!

  Jeremy | 15-Sep-2009 4:56 pm

  Hi Raul,
  Thanks for your comment; unfortunately it is because co-creation is so big and far reaching that some agencies are paying the type of lip-service you describe, muddying the waters and devaluing the term as a result. We need to be aware of this but make sure it doesn't become the main issue surrounding co-creation within the research world - as you say it is far too important and fundamental an activity for us to spend all our time fiddling at edges of its definition while the world around embraces its principles.
  Jeremy

  Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment

• Job Muscroft | 17-Sep-2009 3:30 pm

  There is a backlash against co-creation from some parts of the industry because it requires researchers to take a different role. Co-creation means taking a step back ourselves and acting more as facilitators and enablers of direct contact between brands and consumers.
  
  We need to be provokers of debate, conduits for information, encouraging consumers and brands to think for themselves and to think and act together.
  
  This does not mean that the day of the debrief is dead, or that there is no place for insightful, objective, inspirational guidance from researchers. Instead it means that we need to see ourselves more as part of a triangular relationship between brands, people and researchers rather than a linear one where we stand between clients and consumers.
  
  Of course, this all requires time and space to allow people to talk to each other and for brands to get involved in the conversation. We need time to build trust between people, and we need time to respond to and build on what people are saying. Crucially we need to accept that if consumers are going to become more equal partners in our approach to generating insight and innovation we need to build more continuous relationships with the people we are working with. This might mean spending two days working with consumers face to face or it can mean spending months or years working with particular communities of people. This is
  not about gathering a snapshot of opinion in a focus group or a hurriedly captured set of answers through a survey (as valuable as those methods remain), this is about working with people who are giving you the best of themselves, who move along the learning curve with
  you, who come to establish a relationship based on trust. All of these things require time.
  
  Probably the most significant principle that underpins our view of new ways of working with consumers is that interaction between people – whether consumers or brand owners – is absolutely vital. Fostering and participating in conversations between people is fundamental to the idea of co-creating insights and innovation. This is important in a number of different
  ways. Firstly it mirrors the way that we generally live as human beings – we are, after all, social animals. Secondly, it reflects the way we increasingly consume media and make decisions about what we buy, read, watch, and do. Thirdly it allows for a different kind of
  research landscape, one which subverts the traditional question and answer format – a relatively unfamiliar form of human communication and interaction – and replaces it with something far more natural and intuitive. In this world consumers are encouraged to talk to each other rather than to researchers, opinions are offered, agreed with, disputed, challenged and developed. By working in a more natural communication mode we hear views expressed in real voices, and more importantly we end up discussing things and asking questions we didn’t even know existed or that we wanted to ask. This can lead to some “fortunate accidents” – insights that you have stumbled upon almost by chance. It is a reasonably good principle – though not always true – that if you know what question to ask you probably have a pretty good idea of what the answer is or might be. The mantra is simple: stop asking questions and start listening to conversations.
  
  For more information and debate on co-creation check out our blog and papers @ www.facegroup.co.uk

Alle nieuwe mogelijkheden worden aangegrepen om te delen in meningen.

Youtube

Het videokanaal waar een ieder zijn creatie, fascinatie en of kritiek over een andermans creatie kan posten. Ook op deze geposte filmpjes kan er een heel vervolg komen met meningen.

Ook in de politiek gaat men de mensen proberen te bereiken via deze media. Rita Verdonk uitte haar kritiek op de begroting. En hoopt zo zieltjes te winnen. Of in ieder geval aandacht. Slimmer lijkt het mij om via zo'n filmpje je zelf objectief open te stellen en dan de mensen aandachtsgebieden te laten aansnijden.

Weten wat het volk bezighoudt is een must voor de politieke partijen. En co-creation/participatory Culture is hier in de puurste vorm op zijn plek.

Debat over co-creation: 'The Yes and the no.'

http://www.research-live.com/features/is-co-creation-over-hyped?/4000848.article

Is co-creation over-hyped?

Co-creation promises to break down the barriers between researchers, consumers and marketers. But how much substance is there behind all the hype?

Sheila Keegan counts herself as an advocate of co-creation. But she kicked off a debate at this year’s Research conference when she voiced her irritation at the “faddish and ubiquitous use of the term” and questioned whether the excitement surrounding it is justified. Meanwhile Jeremy Brown of Sense Worldwide has been making his living from co-creation for the past decade, and welcomes the attention it is currently receiving.

We asked the two of them to debate whether co-creation is over-hyped.

YES

Sheila Keegan
Co-founder
Campbell Keegan

Co-creation is the new kid on the block – and it has polarised the research industry. Some advocates see it as revolutionising the way we work and dismiss ‘traditional’ research as ineffectual or irrelevant. Critics, meanwhile, claim that co-creation methods can lack research rigour – that they are superficial or poorly structured.

I am a strong advocate of co-creation, but it is not a panacea. I am wary of the hype that risks turning it into hollow marketing jargon, ill-defined and devoid of meaning.

Nonetheless, it is clear that co-creation is important – it is simply how we function as human beings. But at present it lacks a common language and theoretical framework. There is a wealth of applications, but a lack of conceptual clarity. As an industry we need to explore what we mean by co-creation – how it can be understood culturally and socially, and in relation to new scientific thinking. In particular we need to be clearer about how we can maximise its potential and how it can creatively contribute to our strategic thinking.

What do we mean by co-creation? There are at least two (sometimes overlapping) interpretations:

• a cluster of methodologies (often web-based) which involve all or most stakeholders in the co-creation of value, meaning or ideas
• a perspective on the world which views all exploratory or developmental research, by definition, as co-creation. Sociologist Judi Marshall calls this “living life as inquiry”

Methods such as creative workshops, breakthrough events and creative panels have been around for decades, and there is a wealth of guidance on how best to structure and foster creativity in work groups. It is with the development of web-based methodologies that a gulf has opened between exponents of ‘traditional’ vs ‘co-creation’ methodologies.

It is often claimed that online communities can co-create in ways that are qualitatively different from traditional approaches. Certainly technology facilitates exciting opportunities for sharing and developing ideas and connectivity, which can amplify the scope of co-creation. But it is easy to confuse the methodology with the learning and forget that the underlying principles of research still apply. In my view, attention to research structure, analysis and interpretation is needed, whatever the methodology.

Squabbling about the ‘best’ methodology is a waste of time. All research approaches are routes to creating understanding, generating good ideas and formulating appropriate strategies. Different methodologies deliver different perspectives on research issues. We need to choose the ones that are most likely to deliver understanding, regardless of whether these are old, new or recycled. Forecaster Bob Johansen has described this rather nicely as being “methodologically agnostic”.

Ultimately what we sell is good thinking. With our clients (and stakeholders) we create shared understanding, creative direction, the ability to recognise and make sense of ‘data’, to weave plausible and useful stories, to clarify and steer thinking in productive directions. The methodology is a support, not an end point.

But as well as being a research methodology, co-creation is intrinsic to everyday human interaction. In normal conversation, each utterance or gesture that an individual makes calls forth a particular response from the ‘other’ who, in responding, elicits a further response from the first speaker. Moment by moment, these responses steer the conversation. In this way, most conversations are, in large part, improvisational and co-created.

The same processes occur in a research context. Creating understanding, ideas and knowledge is a moment-by-moment, iterative process involving all of the participants. These are not new thoughts – GH Mead developed his theory of symbolic interactionism in the 1930s. The point I am making is that all good research, by its nature, is improvisational and creative. We need to focus on living life as inquiry and not just concentrate on methodology.

Developing this mindset among researchers, clients and participants fosters a collaborative way of working that is essential for consumer-centred innovation. An example is the development of flat beds by British Airways in the 1990s, cited by Langmaid and Andrews in their book The Breakthrough Zone as a co-created success.

‘Research as co-creation’ requires a new model, in which learning is developed, evaluated and steered moment by moment. We need to continually listen, observe, reflect, evaluate and make judgements all at the same time, shaping and being shaped by others.

Good research has always demanded a range of skills: thinking from different perspectives, examining our own emotional, intuitive and conditioned responses and those of others. Co-creation is not the holy grail. As a methodology it has strengths and weaknesses, and we need to fully understand and foster the conditions under which it flourishes. ‘Living life as inquiry’ demands a different mindset, which is both improvisational and rigorous.

If we treat co-creation simply as a fashion we risk trivialising and undermining its development in both these areas.

NO

Jeremy Brown
CEO
Sense Worldwide

Co-creation is certainly being hyped at the moment, but in our opinion deservedly so.

At heart, co-creation describes the exciting new ways that social and technological change enables individuals, groups and organisations to connect, collaborate, solve problems and create new value together. It is set to be the key driver of innovation and growth in the early 21st century – the next step in the way business develops and markets new goods, and a major change in the way we as citizens engage with public services and participate in the political process.

While the significance and impact of co-creation stretch far beyond research, its importance to the discipline cannot be overstated. Many of the key skills and processes involved in co-creation have their origins in research, and many of its key practitioners come from a research background. This gives the industry the opportunity to be at the fulcrum of future business and social change, enabling organisations to better engage with and learn from their customers. This is leading to a potential redefinition of research and expansion of its role.

The importance of co-creation has its roots in the fact that top-down systems, whether multinational corporations or governments, have reached a point where they cannot deliver the required value on their own. A fast-moving marketplace means the bar for success is set higher as consumers become more demanding, and the current downturn is squeezing organisations to do more for less.

As a result organisations are opening up and reaching outside themselves for innovation, whether groups of experts to help solve existing problems, or with consumers themselves to help better fit products and services to their individual needs. In some instances these networks are coming together of their own accord and creating solutions that rival anything offered by ‘proper’ companies.

Many people see co-creation’s plethora of definitions and approaches as a weakness, implying faddishness and a lack of rigour. But this fluidity is in fact part of its strength. Co-creation is an emergent, bottom-up activity that has spread organically via virtual and physical networks. It is defined by its practitioners as they explore its potential and evolve its processes. In a networked digital society, knowledge is negotiated in this way rather than being processed and handed down. The robustness of these emergent ideas is determined by their longevity and success rather than by a single source of authority.

This does not mean that top-down organisations or systems of knowledge are redundant. They are the foundation on which co-creation occurs – providing the efficiencies of scale and expertise required to turn co-created ideas into reality. Similarly, the use of co-creation doesn’t mean throwing out traditional research methods. They are the building blocks from which new, more open, flexible and creative methodologies can be built which ensure that insight and real consumer involvement are a continual and iterative part of the business development process.

Co-creation isn’t an easy option. It requires strong, considered leadership and an understanding of when an organisation’s processes can be open to new ideas and influences and when to hunker down and make internally and individually driven decisions. The key often lies in the preparation, carefully constructing the right conditions at each stage for different groups to come together and collaborate meaningfully. At Sense we find that this involves:

• asking the right questions– stimulating participants’ curiosity and imagination through exercises that channel their creativity,
• of the right people – selecting a group with a range of levels of familiarity with the business challenge, to both fuel and temper thinking,
• in the right way – creating an emphatic connection with participants, and ensuring they feel they are making a difference.

Nor is co-creation the answer to everything. I wouldn’t want a major surgical operation to be co-created, but I might want the organisation to take a co-creative approach to deliver a more responsive and relevant service experience. Co-creation helps to construct the right briefs that pinpoint the key issues to be tackled. Its outputs are often a further set of questions – ‘how might we do X?’ for example – that frame an opportunity and set the business challenge that needs to be addressed if real innovation is to occur.

The hype about co-creation is justified and useful if it brings people’s attention to the practice. We’ve been co-creating with our own network of ‘expert creatives’ for ten years now, and from our wealth of experience we have developed guidelines and frameworks that have survived the true test of worth – our clients. They recognise that co-creation produces real value.

Sheila Keegan’s book Qualitative Research is due to be published in October byKogan Page. Sense’s white paper The Spirit of Co-Creation can be downloaded

Twee sterke meningen die een open blik geven naar het positieve en/of negatieve aspect van Co-Creation. Voor een objectieve kijker denk ik dat deze twee mensen een eerlijke kijk geven op het onderwerp. Ze staren zich niet blind op de eigen mening waardoor eerlijk elke kant van co-creation wordt benoemd.

Hier is nuttige informatie en inspiratie uit te halen voor mijn toekomstvisie en onderzoeksvraag.