Co-creation: the right experts will take you where consumers never can BROUGHT TO YOU BY MASH
“The world we have created is a product of our thinking, it cannot be changed without changing our thinking first”
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Now more than ever it’s vital for businesses and brands to be consumer-centric. But just because we place consumer needs at the heart of our strategy, it doesn’t mean we should place consumers at the heart of our innovation process. Brands need to look beyond consumers for the knowledge, experience and inspiration to stretch their thinking outside of the world they know today and get to new and inspiring places. It’s not unusual for brands to work with experts, but they often take a very narrow view of which experts to work with, when to work with them and how. Often experts are feeding in technical category expertise at defined moments and to very specific briefs. Instead we need to open our minds to the full range of people, experiences and areas of expertise that can inspire us to look at our consumers, brands and categories in new ways. Over the years, we have worked with hundreds of experts globally across a range of brands and strategic and innovation challenges. From this experience we have identified 4 key ways to assure expert collaboration drives innovation success.
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Consumers‌ a time and a place We are not suggesting consumers should be completely removed from the innovation process. But we must recognise their perspective is rooted in the world of today. Consumers can help us understand their needs and behaviours. But it is often too much to ask them how their needs might be met in new and different ways in the future, or what it would take to change their attitudes or behaviours. The role of consumers should be focussed on early exploratory work and then later in the process to help us shape our innovations to make them market ready. We cannot rely on them to make the creative leaps to get the groundbreaking, disruptive ideas we need.
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The power of parallel worlds True breakthroughs come from bringing the outside in. From looking to culture, the start-up community, academia and more, to find the game-changer inspiration that will take us to new places. And we have found that by far the most powerful approach to exploring these parallel worlds is collaborating with experts who are deeply immersed in them. The key is diversity, to find a team of experts who each has a very different area of expertise and set of experiences to bring to the challenge. This could be journalists or cultural commentators, entrepreneurs or angel investors, academics inventors or ‘wildcards’ from all walks of life. For example, on a recent project exploring Gen Z’s values, we collaborated with a youth culture expert, a young adult author, a teen beauty blogger and an online gaming expert. They helped us to discover not only how Gen Z’s lives, attitudes and values differ from other generations, but also new ways to relate and communicate with them.
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Slow as well as fast creativity Of course it’s more than just who you work with, it’s how you collaborate with them that makes a big difference. We have found that people with a rich and deep knowledge of a certain area don’t necessarily perform to their best working to strict time scales on fixed agendas where they are being asked to summon thoughts and ideas on the spot. Instead they tend to thrive when they are given the space to reflect on the challenge, to dig deeper into specific questions and to have the luxury of time to allow inspiration to strike. Much like with inventors and entrepreneurial innovators, ideas are not summoned up ‘on demand’ to a strict timetable, they are allowed to evolve more naturally.
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Collaborate and collide ideas Collaboration isn’t a linear, one-way process where each area of expert knowledge is kept in silos. We see the true power of experts from parallel worlds coming from how they collaborate; with each other, with us, with clients and with consumers. Allowing people to do this over time, constantly sharing thinking, combining ideas from these different worlds in an iterative process that gets us to exciting and fresh places. It’s how you get to breakthrough ideas. It’s rarely an instant flash of inspiration. Rather it’s a journey as each new piece of left-field thinking builds on those of the past and takes you to somewhere new.
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MashWorks is our online platform that makes it simple to connect with experts from parallel worlds to help stretch your thinking We found that bringing these experts from parallel worlds together could be a time consuming and costly experience. Particularly when you have to find people who are not only experts in their field, but also available at a specific time and in a specific place. So we have built a network of diverse experts and brought them together on an online collaboration platform to make their expertise more accessible.
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So how does it work? It’s a simple 4 step process where you share your challenge, choose your experts, collaborate online and have your insights, big themes & ideas captured by the Mash team.
Collaborating with experts online is an inspiring experience to be part of, and the method is flexible enough to be applied to a variety of challenges. Whether it is gathering initial ideas ahead of kicking off a project, digging for fresh insights, boosting a workshop and getting live feedback, disrupting your thinking, accelerate your strategy or as a sounding board for your ideation & innovation. So far MashWorks has helped clients such as Unilever, WaterAid, Drinkaware and Boots across a wide range of challenges…
• Exploring the world of Gen Z consumers • Discovering disruptive business models for ice cream • Uncovering pioneering technologies and trends set to shape male grooming • Developing a new online channel strategy • Exploring local sustainability insights in Turkey • Researching global music trends in developing markets to create a music platform • Cultivating a prototype product to instil behaviour change in drinkers
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We have found the MashWorks experience to be inspiring for clients and experts alike… “I liked the live feed and the enthusiasm of the experts, they are spot on. High level of engagement and passion to the project … the outcome is very impressive.” – Aimee, Client “It was very intuitive and it was good that we could choose our time when to read and respond, especially important when having busy agendas” – Patrick, Client “I liked the richness and depth of knowledge from experts. Flexibility and strong support of the Mash team, very quick and high quality turnaround of findings” – Burcu, Client “Easy, fit around other commitments, fun, liked the online platform. Great experience” – Rebecca, Expert “For some time, I have believed Virtual teams are the way forward… having the ability to recruit intelligence from experts from diverse backgrounds clearly makes greater sense than relying on inhouse personnel to resolve every issue” – Gary, Expert So the next time you have a challenge that would benefit from a stretch in thinking, think experts from parallel worlds, think MashWorks, and get in touch Jonathan Williams – jonathanw@mash.uk.com – 07734 563 541 Rebecca Wright – rebeccaw@mash.uk.com – 07808 157488 Liana Gregorians – lianag@mash.uk.com – 07790 091 0443 Watch our MashWorks film here https://vimeo.com/mashtv/mashworks
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Just a small sample of the experts in our network …
Mark Champkins British Inventor of the Year, Inventor in Residence at the Science Museum and Dragons’ Den Winner. Rekha Mehr Entrepreneur & Pistachio Rose founder. MBE 2016 New years honours for services to enterprise & entrepreneurship. Ben Brown FinTech expert & VouChaCha founder. VouChaCha was acquired as part of a £55m deal. Featured in the Guardian.
Sam Jones Behaviour expert on millennials. Queens Young Leader Finalist 2015. 100+ Keynotes by age 26. Called upon from 6 figure startups to young public figures. Rachel Walker
Food & Drink Trend Analyst. The Sunday Times food writer and Reader’s Digest food & drink editor. Carolyn Mair
Fashion Psychologist. PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, MSc Research Methods Psychology with a focus on fashion.
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Mash is a Strategy Studio based in the heart of London working with global companies including Unilever, Samsung, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson and Beam Suntory. We help people inspire change within their business to drive growth for their brands. If you would like to have a chat about how we can help your business or brand then call us on +44 20 3176 2462 or drop us an email. Jonathan Williams jonathanw@mash.uk.com Conrad Persons conradp@mash.uk.com Emma Sant emmas@mash.uk.com Anna Cooper annac@mash.uk.com Rebecca Wright rebeccaw@mash.uk.com Fiona Lovatt fional@mash.uk.com