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How to ... meet your customers

By Simon Young, 2007-10-12 20:29:15
Originally published in Idealog #11, page 94

Your customers have more to offer than just their money (lovely though it is). These days some come along for the ride

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Idealog September/October 2007, page 94. Photograph: Getty Images

Who cooks up the marketing for your business? Increasingly, it should be your customers.

It makes perfect sense on paper. After all, who knows what your customers want better than your customers?

It gets a little bit more chaotic once reality kicks in. But co-creation—of products, of communications, of ideas—is an inexorable trend and you either adapt or become irrelevant.

Like all changes, it’s uncomfortable at best and downright threatening at worst. Co-creation threatens seemingly well-established intermediary organisations, such as the media (think about what that word means—the middle) and the advertising industry.

But Siimon Reynolds isn’t worried. He’s chairman of Sydney-based ad agency Love and a founding director of the Photon Group, which owns a range of advertising companies, from billboard specialists to direct marketers.

Reynolds says the ad agency of the future will be more like the conductor of an orchestra than the musicians themselves. “Advertising used to be done in Madison Avenue and sent to the world. Now it’s done in each country of the world,” he says, “and soon it will be done in even closer collaboration with consumers.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more brands saying, ‘We’re not just a brand, we’re a community. Tell us what you think, what we should do, what we should say’,” says Reynolds.

But that listening should be real, warns innovation specialist Jake Pearce. “It’s really important to define what co-creation isn’t as well as what it is,” says Pearce. “It’s not just about consumers coming up with ads for you. It’s not doing focus groups and asking people if they’ve got any ideas for your company. Co-creation is the process whereby there is an ongoing engagement between two parties who organically explore a problem and find a range of possible solutions together to that problem.”

It’s quite a significant shift for most business owners and marketers. The primary analogy for marketing is warfare—setting up campaigns, hitting targets and winning market share as if it were so much land.

Co-creating your marketing is frightening because it unveils ‘the market’ as people. People with opinions, sometimes strongly held.

It’s these people, says Pearce, who can help you a great deal. “Those who really understand co-creation as a process realise that the consumer needs to effectively become part of the team,” he says. “You are effectively constructing products with your loyalists.

“The technology is available to have a genuine conversation with people—if we choose to,” he continues. “But for a lot of marketers it’s like giving an ancient Egyptian a nuclear bomb. They just don’t know what to do with it.”

“Co-creating your marketing is frightening because it unveils “the market” as people. People with opinions, sometimes strongly held”

A couple of UK-based consultants have come up with a simple but powerful way to introduce the co-creation mindset to companies. James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore recommend working with a partner to co-create a character.

The equipment: a piece of paper and a pen or pencil each.

The rules: just one—no talking.

The objective is to co-create a picture of a face. The first person starts with a single element of the face. It’s whatever they like—an eye, a nose, an ear. The second person then adds another element of the face, and the two partners continue until one of them hesitates—a signal that the face is finished.

Then you start co-creating this character’s name, one letter at a time. Again, when a partner hesitates, it means the name is finished.

Moore and Cherkoff recommend completing this process at least three times, and analysing it together afterwards. Would either partner have come up with this character alone? Was it enjoyable? Disturbing? What surprised you? What did you learn from working together?

According to Moore and Cherkoff, participants sometimes find this exercise pointless but strangely compelling. In a manifesto entitled ‘Co-creation rules!’ (available free at ChangeThis) they say, “People often take part in these games with more commitment than they do in regular business meetings—meetings that, in theory, are about much more important topics.”

The manifesto also has 17 rules of co-creation (the last rule being, of course, that there are no rules). Here are a few that you can apply to marketing and communications:

Set the scene. A blank screen can scare off any creative person. Get the co-creative juices flowing with definite aims, goals and motives. Or as the manifesto puts it: “Let me know what you want me to do. And how. And why.”

Make your customers look good. The best way to get people’s attention these days is to give them a platform. And the tools for self-expression are already there—YouTube, Bebo or MySpace, anyone?

Play. When you’re having fun, people want to join in. That means being able to laugh at yourself, with your customers. (Don’t worry, when they laugh it means they like you.)

Make mistakes. Of course mistakes happen anyway, but the manifesto’s advice is to not hide those mistakes. Or as a customer might say, “Let me decide what’s perfect.”

Lower barriers. Customers like to express themselves, but they won’t jump through too many hoops to do so. As Moore and Cherkoff say, make it as easy as possible for people to use and incorporate what you do into their lives.

Work at it. The idea of customers doing all the work for you has a naive appeal. But according to Moore and Cherkoff, participation is hard work, perhaps harder than traditional marketing.

That last point is key. Once you open yourself up to the conversation, you’re committed—and that can be a frighteningly open-ended commitment.

But if it’s a conversation with your most profitable customers, it’s a commitment worth making—and ensuring you can continue—because the pay-offs are worth it. “If you have effectively and genuinely co-created a product with your loyalists, the chances of messing it up are effectively lower,” says Pearce. “It’s a cheaper and more effective way to do R&D.”

Threadless is a company that makes t-shirts designed by its customers. Founded by two Generation C entrepreneurs who didn’t know better, Threadless forgoes much of the traditional risk of starting a new business.

Customers submit t-shirt designs to the website, and other customers vote on the designs. As well as indicating a simple ranking out of five, customers can tick an ‘I’d buy it’ box. If the design wins, it’s made into a product with a guaranteed audience of fans. No focus groups, no guessing, no mucking around.

But it’s a double-edged sword. Threadless is accountable to its community, which is quick to complain if anything goes wrong. The path of transparency, once taken, allows no u-turns.

Another company that has pioneered co-creation is Lego. In the late 20th century, marketers at Lego became aware of what they called a ‘shadow market’—a group of adults who would spend up to US$20,000 on Lego bricks every year.

Between 1998 and 2003, Lego underwent a culture change from regarding this group as a ‘shadow market’ to inviting them into the creation process. “We didn’t realise how powerful they were,” says Mark William Hansen, director of business development for Lego Universe, in a video presentation posted online.

In the presentation, Hansen posted ten dos and don’ts for companies looking to co-create:

Lego has seen the benefits of co-creation, not only from within its group of enthusiastic global collaborators, but also from sales of products designed by customers and by the media buzz around the uniqueness of product co-creation.

Where is this headed? Pearce projects a world where consumers are the ones doing the selling. “At its absolute logical extreme,” says Pearce, “companies will compete for ideas with customers and split the revenue. The world will turn upside down.”

So open your kitchen door, and let your customers help cook up your marketing—and your products—with you. You’ll be the right way up when things turn upside down.

1 comment

fred

2007-11-02 00:29:07

As a starter in the trading of forest,what step do you choose for me to go into the market place to sale my dolars?

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