Better Together Volume 2: Unlocking the power of consumers

Jonathan Midenhall, former CMO of Airbnb, rightly pointed out “amazing things will happen when you listen to the customer”. Indeed, brands and marketers have understood that the old ways of doing marketing, where brands could push any product or message to ‘silent’ consumers, are no longer valid. Consumers are key stakeholders that should play a central role in every business.

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Many brands are investing actively in becoming more ‘consumer-centric’.

Yet, as we illustrated in the first volume of this bookzine series, simply putting the consumer at the heart of the value proposition is not enough. Businesses and marketers need to embrace a more active approach towards consumer centricity. It’s about integrating the voice of the consumer in everything they do, by everyone in the organization.

Being ‘consumer-centric’ necessitates brands getting close to their consumers, continuously keeping a finger on the pulse. Rather than taking a snapshot of consumers’ lives and behavior, organizations need to establish a practice of ongoing consumer collaboration. In fact, we could extend Mr. Midenhall’s fine words: ‘amazing things will happen when you listen to the customer, and even greater ones when you collaborate with them’.

Amazing things will happen when you listen to your customer, and even greater ones when you collaborate with them However, many collaboration initiatives are limited to asking consumers for the occasional round of feedback. They are considered too often as mere ‘validators’, reducing their role to sharing feedback on some final hypotheses at the end of a project. Yet giving feedback is just one dimension of a consumer’s collaboration power. There are consumers that have the interest, experience and competence to be involved in far more. Think about people with a particular passion, experts in the field that enjoy sharing what is new and next in that area. Canadian Lewis George Hilsenteger is one of those passionate consumers. Being a tech enthusiast, he started ‘Unbox Therapy’, an unboxing and technology review YouTube channel. In 2014, he even caused Apple’s ‘Bendgate’ controversy, by launching the first video that shows how easily an iPhone 6 Plus can be bent by simply applying a bit of pressure (Unbox Therapy, 2014).

There are also those consumers with a creative mind, that like to think out of the box and want to get involved in shaping the solution space, such as the IKEA hackers. Founded in 2006 by a brand fan, the IKEA hackers community already generated more than 5,000 ideas to modify IKEA furniture, from all over the globe. In 2018, for its 75th anniversary, IKEA launched a splashy new collection called ‘Lyskraft’, with products inspired by the hackers community. “Hacking and DIY are trends that continue to grow. More and more people take creativity into their

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own hands, loving to remake and renew. And so do we at IKEA. The hackers are an inspiration to us, and with Lyskraft, we feel it’s our time to show we got inspired by them,” says Michael Nikolic, IKEA’s creative lead (Fast Company, 2018).

Initiatives like ‘Unbox Therapy’ and the IKEA hackers community show that consumers have a range of skills and competencies that can go beyond merely sharing feedback. Tapping into this diverse skillset is highly relevant for brands, especially since some of these are rare or difficult to internalize.

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We therefore need to shift from a unidimensional perspective – the consumer as validator – to a multidimensional perspective: the consumer as multi-collaborator, valuing their entire skill set. It’s about recognizing the full potential of consumers in collaboration efforts.

We need to shift from a unidimensional – the consumer as validator – to a multidimensional perspective: the consumers as multi-collaborator

CONSUMER COLLABORATION:

FROM A ‘PARENTTO-CHILD’ TO AN ‘ADULT-TO-ADULT’ APPROACH Graeme Lawrence - Managing Partner (UK)

As part of my agency induction in 1997, I was sent out face-to-face interviewing, conducting random-route in-home interviews. It was a bit of a chastening experience, but I’ve always used it as a key reference in what we need to cherish and maintain and, more importantly, how we develop and progress as an industry.

Looking back on those interviews, I’m reminded that they operated in ‘questionto-answer’ mode. Were they stable and robust? Sure. Did they provide true consumer understanding? Not really.

Much of market research, such as these in-home surveys, are parent-to-child constructs; ‘we ask a question’ and ‘the consumer provides an answer’. With the rise of the ‘participative web’, new opportunities arose to connect with consumers.

Via online research communities, brands can engage with people on an ongoing and equal basis. We moved from a parent-to-child construct towards true collaboration, or an adult-to-adult relationship. As a Global Client Partner at InSites Consulting, I’m now at the forefront to help brands truly understand their consumers via online consumer communities, where we focus on building and managing such equal relationships. This adult-to-adult mode is not easy to establish; arguably this might explain why the parent-to-child survey is still a popular approach in our industry. However, investing in consumer engagement techniques and collaboration programmes leads to more impactful results. It’s no longer about uncovering what consumers believe we wish to hear, but about truly understanding their lives, needs and aspirations.

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THE 90-9-1 PRINCIPLE Then again, not all consumers are equally experienced, talented or skilled to go beyond their role as validator. Bradley Horowitz, VP at Google, also noticed this participation discrepancy in the media-content sphere. Observing people’s behavior on photosharing website Flickr inspired Horowitz to formulate the 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality (Horowitz, 2006).

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THE 90-9-1 PRINCIPLE This rule states that 90% of users will merely consume content, 9% will like, share or react to what is created, and only 1% will actually create something. The first group are labeled ‘lurkers’, the second ‘curators’ and the last ‘creators’. This participation rule is visible throughout social contribution platforms and channels. Take Twitter, where a vast majority of the users never posts a single tweet. According to a study, 80% of all tweets come from the top 10% of tweeters (Pew Research Center, 2019). Wikipedia, which has grown into the world’s largest reference website, experiences this phenomenon as well. The platform attracts 1.7 billion unique visitors a month, 129,325 of which are active contributors, 8

which means that less than 1% creates content (Wikipedia, 2020).

As a consumer collaboration agency, we found that this ‘90-9-1 rule’ is also present in the context of brand-consumer collaborations. Our experience shows that the significant majority of people (around 90%) can and like to share feedback, some 9% are extremely passionate and can curate, and only 1% is truly innovative and creative.

90% of people are validators, 9% are curators and only 1% are creators

1% Creators

Users that often contribute

9% Curators

Users that observe and occasionally contribute

90% Lurkers

Users that observe but don’t contribute 9

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The 90% are those we label ‘everyday consumers’, people that use brands day in day out and can effortlessly share their frictions, needs and aspirations based on these consumption experiences. The 9% are ‘leading-edge consumers’, people living on the edge (think for example heavy users, but also trendsetters, or even early adopters) that can articulate what’s new and next, and can help curate the future. Lastly, the 1% are the ‘creative consumers’, people that like thinking out of the box and want to help brands shape the solution space. Different people thus come with a different set of unique skills and competences; the power of consumer collaboration lies in embracing this diverseness.

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The power of consumer collaboration lies in embracing diverseness

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In fact, the ‘diversity trumps ability’ theorem states that a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers (Hong & Page, 2004). This explains the success of hackathons such as organized by MATLAB, where programmers collaborate to create a better solution than any single one of them would put forward individually.

“The best algorithm at the end of the contest period exceeds the best algorithm from day one by a magnitude of one thousand”

Ned Gulley, Design Lead at MATLAB

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If you look at the mix of people in organizations, these often form very homogenous groups, with members sharing similar education, perspectives, and problem-solving techniques. While they might be the best in class for some tasks, they won’t be for everything. In that sense, multiple heads are not better than one when it’s really only a single head (Page, 2007).

An example is what happened at H&M when they launched the much-debated ‘Coolest monkey in the jungle’ campaign picture. The problem was not so much that the brand lacked ethnical diversity: each office was close to a real reflection of the ethnic demographics of the cities they were located in. What H&M truly lacked, was a different type of diverseness. The brand’s strong company culture – heavily focused on taking decisions in consensus – did not encourage any debate or 12

the exchange of diverse thoughts and opinions. “Because everyone has to agree on decisions in our consensus culture, we also don’t like to speak up about spikes of good things or bad things,” says Annie Wu, Chief Diversity Officer at H&M Group. “They actually have a word for that in Swedish, ‘lagom’, which means ‘everyone’s kind of just in the middle’. You don’t want to stick out in any way.”. It seems that by installing this dominant reference frame, H&M nullified its own diverseness, leading to the sweatshirt incident (Refinery29, 2019).

When rallying around business challenges, great power lies in involving a truly diverse set of people

When rallying around business challenges, great power therefore lies in involving a truly diverse set of people. Not only to deviate away from a dominant reference frame, but because every individual possesses some knowledge or talent that another individual will find valuable.

Or as Montaigne once said, “The only thing we all have in common is that we are all quite different”. Consumer collaboration leverages this diverseness by embracing the full potential of consumers. It allows to tap into a wide variety of competences and skills, some of which might not be available in your organization.

“We learned through 132 years of experience that true innovation is seldom the work of solitary genius.

Rather, it is the result of collaboration enriched by diverse opinions, approaches and experiences.”

Alex Gorsky, Chairman of the Board and CEO at Johnson & Johnson

Being consumer-centric requires that brands move from simply listening to consumers, to collaborating with them. It’s about recognizing their diverse skills and collaborating with the right consumer on the right task. On the next pages, we will deep dive into the different consumer profiles, and into how to get the most out of these collaboration initiatives.

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MEET THE 90

THE EVERYDAY CONSUMERS We are all consumers. From the moment we switch off our alarm in the morning until we brush our teeth before bed in the evening, we are consuming countless products, services and brand content.

In doing so, we become ‘experts by experience’. By simply living the consumption experience, we build knowledge around brands, products and services. People that have been using a product or a service for a very long time in particular are fully aware of the ins and outs of the brand and its history. It can go as far that some do not tolerate that brands deviate from their iconic brand heritage.

Think for example Mondelēz, that decided in 2016 to change its Toblerone chocolate by increasing the gaps between its triangular chunks, the shape of which refers to the Matterhorn. Two years later, the brand was forced to backtrack due to heavy backlash from its dedicated Toblerone fans.

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who ARE THEY

As experts by experience, everyday consumers can effortlessly share their frictions, needs and aspirations around consumption experiences.

This does not mean they have the talent to formulate creative solutions for their unmet needs. Like Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. Indeed, everyday 16

consumers might not be able to envision how they want their needs fulfilled, but they can vocalize what they like or not when they consume products, services, or brand content.

As experts by experience, everyday consumers can effortlessly share their frictions, needs and aspirations around consumption experiences

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ZOOM IN ON ‘THE RIGHT 90’ Because of their experiential knowledge, everyday consumers are invaluable sources of input and feedback for brands. Yet to zoom in on their everyday reality, it’s vital to invite ‘the right 90’. Whether you are interested in talking about your product category, your brand or a societal relevant theme like sustainability, consumers need to have a minimum level of involvement in the collaboration topic to contribute relevantly and constructively. The same goes for location; to capture the consumers’ contextual background, it’s vital to zoom in on the actual consumer context.

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why

TO CONNECT & COLLABORATE WITH THEM Do you own a pair of Google’s smart glasses? Probably not. While the technology as such is not a failure – the glasses are currently used in workplaces such as factories, warehouses and hospitals – this revo18

lutionary product never made it in the consumer market. Consumers could not figure out why they needed this device in their lives, and the picture feature was perceived as intrusive. The failure of Google’s smart glasses was the result of a product-market misfit, as the brand did not understand its consumers’ needs and wants.

And Google’s smart glasses are no exception. In general, product failure rate estimations lie between 40% and 95%, with a lack of market fit cited as the major cause (Castellion & Markham, 2013; CB Insights, 2019; Harvard Business School, 2011). Too often, the desire to do something new – rather than responding to a need in the market – inspires big brands to launch a new product, add an additional flavor to their assortment, or tap into a new market. This is even more present amongst start-ups, where 42% fail because no one is buying their product (Mind the Product, 2019). So, why is it so hard for brands to develop a product that people want and care about?

YOU ARE NOT YOUR CONSUMER Many marketers and company stakeholders are not that much like the consumers they serve, despite what they think. An Australian study shows how marketers are living in their own ((sub)urban) bubble, literally out of touch with everyday consumers. According to the survey, 41% of Sydney agency people live in the city or inner city, compared to just 4% of the general public (Mumbrella, 2013). As a result, they often have a very different lifestyle.

Many marketers and company stakeholders are not that much like the consumers they serve, despite what they think

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In 2018, advertising legend Sir John Hegarty confirmed this ‘bubble issue’: “We live in this weird bubble called marketing, and we don’t step outside and behave like a normal member of the public. It’s bizarre.

Marketing people are living in a constant bubble.” (AdNews, 2018).

Living in a bubble, however, is our natural state of being. People have a natural tendency to connect with others that are similar, be it in their marriage, in peer groups, in neighborhoods, but also at the workplace.

The sociological term for this phenomenon is ‘homophily’ (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1954); similarity breeds affection, and, as illustrated by H&M’s ‘Coolest monkey in the jungle’ incident, its implications are not always positive.

Next to the issue of homophily, there are several significant cognitive biases that can make it hard for marketers and brand owners to truly understand what consumers are asking for. Think for example about people’s tendency to interpret new evidence as a confirmation of one’s 20

existing beliefs and theories, a phenomenon coined ‘the confirmation bias’. This bias might make marketers reject results that conflict with their personal view, and overplay those in line with their beliefs. Or the sunk cost fallacy, a bias that makes people follow through on an endeavor if they have already invested time, effort and/or money into it, regardless of whether the current costs outweigh the benefits.

“People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for”

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mocking Bird

Immersing in the lives of everyday consumers can help reprogram these biases and overcome the disconnect between consumers and marketers. These consumers can help brands gain an understanding of the consumer reality. It’s precisely through connecting and collaborating with them that marketers can extract valuable insights for their brand to thrive in the market.

‘THE 90’ IS L’ORÉAL’S CONSUMER-CENTRICITY LIGHTHOUSE Gaël Chevé - CMI International L’Oréal Active Cosmetics

At L’Oréal, we have been collaborating with everyday consumers in our ‘So Healthy’ Square since 2016. This online consumer community consists of a very diverse group of women, all interested in skincare and well-being in general, that give us a glimpse into their everyday reality. Our passionate marketers are super experts in their category and highly involved in the brand; but of course, it’s always possible that one over-rationalizes consumers’ spontaneous, sometimes even paradoxical, reactions. The ‘So Healthy’ community helps us connect and collaborate with real women, getting instant feedback from five different markets, which helps us to develop our consumer-centric thinking even further. We tap into the community for very tactical research challenges but also for slightly more strategic ones, mostly centered around marketing development. Think for example claim and packaging testing, but also uncovering shifting skincare needs across different markets around the globe.

Next to that, the InSites team has set up an ‘Adopt the consumer’ program where, for four months, marketers follow a consumer from the ‘So Healthy’ community and organize monthly web calls. This direct connection adds to our marketers’ consumer understanding and empathy. For example, having a woman talk about and show her skin problems during such a live call truly brings the daily struggles and needs of the consumer to life, inspiring and activating our internal stakeholders. These encounters really stick with them, and they also help our marketers to better communicate with consumers, adopting their language.

However, there is this famous quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” And indeed, everyday consumers can provide feedback – I would even call them our consumer-centricity lighthouse – but they cannot envision the future. That might be something to explore further in the next years – onboarding more visionary, leading-edge consumers to get an understanding of what’s new and next.

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how

TO SET UP COLLABORATION INITIATIVES Consumer collaboration requires marketers to immerse in the context and everyday reality of their consumers – not the other way around.

Rather than inviting consumers into a lab setting to test a product, it’s about observing how consumers are experiencing products and services in their own context and at their own pace. Marketers thus need to go

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to ‘the real place’, a concept also referred to as ‘gemba’.

Marketers need to go to ‘the real place’, a concept also referred to as ‘gemba’ This Japanese term, originating from Toyota’s Total Quality Management, refers to the place where things are happening. So, in the case of manufacturing, it’s the factory floor. In police work, gemba would be the crime scene. And in the consumer context, it’s where they interact with brands, like in a supermarket, their living room, or even their workplace. By (digitally) going where the real action is taking place, marketers and business stakeholders gain insights into these real consumer experiences.

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“Having jumped the hurdle of trying out online qualitative research makes people realize they don’t have to get in their car to drive to a venue, but they can just log in from the privacy of their own home.

All the convenience that comes with this online world makes it easy to get people into this space.”

Tiina Raikko, Director at Fuel Consulting

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THE RIGHT BLEND OF ACTIVITIES To tap into consumers’ ‘real’ opinions, feelings and behavior, using the right blend of research activities is key. Based on our experience, we identified three types of collaboration activities that aid brands in capturing the everyday consumer reality: ‘think’, ‘feel’ and ‘do’ activities.

‘THINK’ ACTIVITIES ‘Think’ activities allow to grasp perceptions, reflections, opinions and attitudes people can easily translate into words. They focus on capturing system-2 processes, or those consumer decisions which are taken more deliberately and consciously (in contrast to system-1 processes which are automatic and 24

unconscious). Examples of such ‘think’ activities are online discussions with one or more consumers around a brand, category or topic.

Or visual tagging, where consumers are to indicate which part of a visual (e.g. packaging, campaign material) they like or dislike, adding the reason why.

‘FEEL’ ACTIVITIES ‘Feel’ activities are used to uncover consumers’ emotions that influence their thoughts and behavior. These emotions can be latent, like consumers’ reactions to a TV commercial, subconsciously driving their behavior. In this context, indirect and projective techniques are used to capture instinctive and implicit consumer decisions (system-1 processes). A ‘feel’ activity

that captures consumers’ emotions more explicitly is emoji attribution, where consumers place different emojis on a (brand) visual to express how they feel about certain parts of the visual.

‘DO’ ACTIVITIES ‘Do’ activities are effective to capture people’s actual behavior. As consumers might struggle to recall and report on their own behavior, ‘do’ activities allow brands to detect latent needs, feelings and behavior that are hard to translate into words.

An example of such a ‘do’ activity would be a diary task; consumers are invited to report on what they are doing right then, in the moment. Diaries can be used to capture spontaneous unprompted actions like consumers’ everyday skincare routines, as well as specific prompted actions. Think for instance about asking people to use a particular product for an entire week when cooking, and to then share visuals and videos of the experience. Or, sending consumers to the supermarket to report on how easily they would find a specific product.

‘Do’ activities are used to a lesser extent with everyday consumers, as most business challenges can be tackled via ‘think’ and ‘feel’ activities.

These activities containing a mix of quantitative and qualitative techniques is essential. Focusing on quantifying ‘what’ is happening is not enough; adding the ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘where’ and especially ‘why’ to the mix is vital to understand the context and stories behind the data. Such a hybrid approach is key to truly immerse in the lives of everyday consumers.

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THE RIGHT ENGAGEMENT MIX Next to creating a blend of fun and interesting activities, it is important to consider participant engagement, an often-underestimated aspect.

Successful consumer collaboration requires a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. Rewarding people with a monetary compensation, thus tapping into their need for recognition, is an important extrinsic motivator. It makes them feel valued for having shared their experiences and for having invested time in the collaboration. Although monetary rewards are not the sole reason for staying engaged, it is a vital element in the engagement mix. It encourages consumers to overcome any initial barriers they might have, and gives them that little push to join a collaboration initiative. Once they are fully on board and participating, 26

intrinsic motivations come to the forefront. Getting to know more about the brand or topic at hand might be a strong intrinsic motivator, especially when it includes ‘exclusive content’ about new products or ideas. The same goes for the social aspect of being part of a group and interacting with peers in many fun activities.

“It was great fun to be a part of this community, and hopefully we could help you to gather some useful knowledge. I will definitely miss my daily visits to this site and especially also the daily emails. Thanks very much to the moderator for making this community an easy and enjoyable experience.”

Member of our own ‘Taking Research Forward’ Square, February 2020

STRONG NETWORKS GO BEYOND INTEREST AND CREATE INVOLVEMENT Henk Pretorius - Managing Partner & Head of Consumer Connection (ZA)

Strong consumer networks consist of interesting, interested and involved people.

We derived this powerful insight from our research on 60 networks in 20 countries with 250,000 consumers over the last five years. This resulted in a framework that applies equally to everyday, leading-edge and creative consumers (i.e. validators, curators, and creators), and is used by our Consumer Connection department as a guide to build our networks.

When establishing a network, we closely manage and monitor three interrelated ‘connection layers’.

Level 1 is about defining who is interesting for our network. Do we need to collaborate with a specific brand’s consumers? Or with a particular demographic profile?

Perhaps with someone unique that is extremely passionate about a category?

Defining what interesting means, narrows our search from the entire population to the right consumer for the business challenge at hand.

Level 2, then, is the step where we seek amongst this group of interesting people those that are interested in collaborating with us. These people show their interest by joining our network, after which they can be steered to collaboration activities relevant to them.

Level 3 is about identifying those people that go beyond merely showing an interest to becoming actively involved in the network through their contributions.

Involved network members share experiences, curate content and create new things based on their unique skills and competences. They’re not just exploring out of curiosity but are truly collaborating.

Combining these three layers – going beyond the focus on ‘interesting and interested’ – has a profound, measurable effect on network performance. Over the course of one year, we observed and compared the dynamics in an involved network versus a network created with interesting and interested people only.

We found that total collaboration – measured as number of research activities completed – increased with more than 50%, similar for retention which increased with 75%.

Involvement, the final ‘connection layer’, is thus key in our success formula for network building, but most likely also the one missing in many network strategies.

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MEET THE SQUARE 28

As experienced consumer collaboration agency, we help brands connect and collaborate with everyday consumers via the Square, our proprietary consumer insight platform. Depending on the research scope, we invite 30 to 10,000 consumers to join a bespoke, digital community environment, where they can participate in qualitative and quantitative activities. Such a Square runs for a period ranging from one week up to several weeks and even years. Based on the research scope, objective or topic, one might decide to use a branded or an unbranded design when launching a Square platform.

Branded Square community for IKEA

Unbranded Square community for Red’s True Barbecue

THE RIGHT NUMBER OF CONSUMERS FOR YOUR SQUARE COMMUNITY PLATFORM Depending on the business challenge at hand – and thus the proposed methodology and relevant target group – one might need to invite a different number of research participants. During our 25 years of running communities, we learned that we need at least 30 answers for a qualitative activity before we reach a certain level of saturation and can confidently start analyzing.

Taking into account the possible non-response, we need at least 50 active participants for qualitative research activities. This can be increased if one works with different subgroups within the sample, or to engage consumers over a longer period. For quantitative activities, each subgroup needs a sample size of at least 100. So, one needs to consider the activity type when defining the right sample size for a community. For personal care company L’Oréal, for example, we recently set up a Square community platform in Hong Kong with more than 2,000 consumers. This gives L’Oréal the capability to engage with specific subgroups in qualitative exercises, as well as to run large validation surveys on a broad sample.

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Each Square platform is managed by a moderator that plays a crucial role in engaging consumers, keeping them energized and installing a group feeling. To match each consumer community with the right moderator, we tap into our own global Community Moderator Network, which gathers 150 certified local moderators in more than 50 countries across all continents. These highly-skilled local moderators do not only speak the local language, they also understand the other cultural aspects of their country or region. This implies that, next to their knowledge of the local market situation and business context, they can easily identify with consumers’ values, beliefs and traditions. This helps us fully grasp the local context of everyday consumers. The nuances added by local moderators have proven to be highly valuable during a project on diabetes for pharma company Merck KGaA. To immerse in the lives of everyday consumers in Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Saudi30

Arabia, we set up four Square community platforms, each managed by a local moderator. Each moderator’s experience with the market’s healthcare system and awareness around public health campaigns running at the time of the project, added to our understanding of people’s preventive behavior in the four markets.

“With ‘Le Monde du Yaourt’, we have a constant view on what our consumer thinks, feels and prefers.

The online community allows us to connect with them on a continuous basis for urgent and tactical as well as strategic matters. More importantly, we do more impactful research at a faster pace with a lower overall investment compared to the past. It is a great tool which supports Danone’s consumercentricity approach.”

Lucie Fromenté Claquin, Senior Strategy & Insights Manager at Danone

THE RIGHT LANGUAGE FOR YOUR SQUARE COMMUNITY PLATFORM Collaborating with everyday consumers allows marketers to adopt a local perspective, gaining an in-depth understanding in consumers’ cultural and contextual background. An important aspect of culture is language. Our experience shows that consumers provide more detail and nuances when they participate in their own language. Our default option is to run Square platforms in the participants’ native language. For example, to support IKEA in solving various business challenges, we gathered Dutch- and French-speaking consumers in the Belgian market in a native-language Square, the IKEA hub, where they could share their input and feedback.

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However, sometimes there can be good reasons to opt for a multi-national English-speaking community. Think about limitedbudget projects, non-native executives of the company that wish to follow the discussion, or a project where a client is in search for global consensus on a given subject rather than an understanding of local differences. For instance, Perrigo, manufacturer of consumer health products, wanted to discuss a broad range of health-related topics with consumers. As the objective was to capture a European understanding rather than specifics for each market, consumers from eight different markets were gathered in one English-speaking community. Next to topic involvement, each participant got screened on their language skills via a TOEFL test, a standardized test to measure the English language knowledge of non-native speakers. This ensured that language would be no barrier to express their thoughts, feelings or feedback, and allowed us to capture elaborate verbatims and extract in-depth insights.

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when TO INVOLVE THEM

Being ‘experts by experience’, everyday consumers can support brands in a number of business challenges, from tactical to more strategic, and throughout different stages of a project. We can identify three different areas: consumer immersion, proposition validation and consumer tracking.

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CONSUMER IMMERSION

Consumer immersion is about deeply immersing in consumers’ everyday life and reality, for an in-depth exploration of a category, market, or topic.

Typically, immersion is used to develop a deeper understanding of consumer attitudes and behavior, identify needs and frictions, and unlock fresh insights.

CASE How Nike immersed with Gen Z consumers in Hong Kong Sports brand Nike wanted to re-engage with its Gen Z consumers in Hong Kong and needed to gain an in-depth understanding of what defines this generation: their beliefs, their values and their attitudes. Via our Square platform, we immersed Nike’s stakeholders in the everyday life of 30 young fashionistas and sneakerheads. The youngsters shared photos and videos of their outfit of the day, showed their shoes and clothes collection, and talked about their favorite Instagram influencers. But they also opened up about who they are and who they want to be. This immersion helped Nike to spark a fresh conversation about sneakers, reigniting the local sneaker culture in Hong Kong.

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PROPOSITION VALIDATION

Proposition validation is aimed at testing relevant solutions, from new service or product concepts to brand activations. It’s about asking consumers to share their opinions and feedback in a short survey, after being exposed to, for example, advertising executions or new concepts. Or by entering a discussion on the Square community where participants can elaborate more on their likes and dislikes. But sometimes we need more than just likes and dislikes, and consumers are invited to help brands develop their propositions. During such a ‘proposition validation’, consumers give a more detailed evaluation of an early-stage concept or execution, while providing recommendations on how to improve it.

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CASE How Van de Velde involved consumers in shaping their new summer collection Van de Velde, the luxury-lingerie company behind brands like Prima Donna, wanted to evaluate which items should feature in its summer collection. To do so, new lingerie ideas were tested on their stopping power, i.e. the extent to which they make people stop to look at the items in-store or click on the item in an e-commerce environment. We used an agile swiping approach, where items were shown and participants had to swipe left (disliked) or right (liked).

Next, we measured holding power, i.e. how likely would people be to ‘try them on’, using 3D visuals offering a 360° view and zoom. To have a detailed overview of the likes and dislikes of a specific lingerie concept, we integrated an iTag tool, where participants would ‘tag’ the aspects they liked and disliked, and add suggestions on how to improve them. The consumer feedback helped Van de Velde identify the concepts with the highest potential for their 2019 summer collection, and shaped the brand’s go-to-market approach.

CONSUMER TRACKING

Consumer tracking is used to track the success of in-market brand, product or service efforts over time. This helps brands keep the finger on the pulse, measuring brand health, purchase and usage, consumers’ brand perceptions and their brand experience across touchpoints.

Consumer tracking will highlight which brand initiatives work well and which don’t, so that the latter can be targeted and improved.

CASE How SkyPriority tracks instant touchpoint performance across their travelers’ journey As an association of 19 airlines, SkyTeam’s mission is to create a seamless travel experience through operational excellence, by putting the customer at the center. Especially for its SkyPriority offering – aimed to give high-value customers a consistent premium experience – the brand needed to capture and understand the consumer experiences throughout all touchpoints. Therefore, we onboarded a network of high-value customers that could provide real-time feedback during their journey through a mobile application. Using geofencing technology, feedback is prompted at relevant occasions (e.g. when a passenger enters an airport), allowing travelers to review each journey touchpoint when relevant for them. Consumer tracking provided SkyPriority with a strong base for future innovations.

“At SkyTeam, our position is to help member airlines offer customers a more seamless travel experience. With the SkyPriority panel project, we can offer our members crucial real-time feedback, allowing them to improve the customer experience.”

Mauro Oretti, Vice President, Marketing & Commercial at SkyTeam I N S I T E S C O N S U LT I N G

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Everyday consumers are therefore valuable and versatile collaboration partners that can help brands and marketers overcome deeply ingrained biases, and fuel decision making by sharing their frictions, needs and aspirations.

Supported by the right blend of activities and engagement mix, they provide a zoom-in on the everyday consumer reality, by showcasing what is happening here and now.

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MEET THE 9

THE LEADINGEDGE CONSUMERS We all know someone that is extremely passionate about a product, category or theme, or follows a particular lifestyle. Someone living on the edge – a heavy user, trendsetter or early-adopter – that knows precisely what is hot and next in a particular area. Think about the tech-enthusiast friend you consult when you want to buy a new pair of headphones, or your ‘foodie’ colleague that always recommends exciting new restaurants. While all of us, being everyday consumers, can share our everyday needs and frictions, only a limited number of people can signal ‘things to come’, thereby curating the future. Those are ‘the 9’ in the 90-9-1 rule, that we label ‘leading-edge consumers’. They recognize needs and opportunities months or even years before the rest of us. This interesting consumer cohort could be considered a need-forecasting laboratory for marketers.

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who ARE THEY

Being extremely passionate and enthusiastic about a particular theme or topic, leading-edge consumers are ‘experts by passion’. Although they might be everyday consumers in other contexts, they are ahead of the game when it comes to their passion point; but this does not necessarily make them influencers. While many do regularly post about their passions on social media or are amongst the first to use new products and services, this is a consequence of them living at the sharp end of trends rather than really defining their status as leading-edge consumers.

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Being extremely passionate and enthusiastic about a particular theme or topic, leading-edge consumers are ‘experts by passion’

ZOOM IN AND OUT ‘The 9’ can talk at length about their personal passions, which can range from food or fashion to technology or drag queen races. Unlike ‘the 90’, they are characterized by a high topic involvement. This makes them interesting collaboration partners for brands that wish to find out what’s new and next in certain areas. These consumers can zoom in on a particular lifestyle or emerging trend and add local nuances. At the same time, with many being well-travelled, they can zoom out and contemplate the societal influence, potential future direction, and impact of a trend at a global level. This ability to zoom both in and out makes leading-edge consumers powerful as trend-savvy collaborators as well as cultural commentators that can interpret global trends through a local market lens.

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Stephanie and Mayank are prime examples of leading-edge consumers.

New York-based Stephanie is an LGBTQ+ activist and member of a transgressive punk feminist art rock band. Mayank is an entrepreneur from New Delhi, and a passionate traveler and food blogger. Both sit at the epicenter of new consumer needs, actively pushing their lifestyles forward.

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TO CONNECT & COLLABORATE WITH THEM Marketers and company stakeholders not only need to understand what consumers need right now, but also how these needs might evolve in the future. It’s about combining strong consumer insights in the present with solid foresights that can help shape the future.

This proactive attitude helps businesses anticipate cultural shifts (i.e.

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slow-moving changes) and emerging trends (i.e. fast-moving changes), rather than merely reacting to them.

Marketers and company stakeholders not only need to understand what consumers need right now, but also how these needs might evolve in the future “The best way to predict the future is to create it”

Peter Drucker, Austrian management consultant & influential business thinker

BUSINESS SHORT-TERMISM Adopting such a proactive future-forward attitude is challenging. In August 2019, ‘The CMO Survey’ asked U.S. marketing leaders: “How much time do you spend managing the present versus preparing for the future of marketing in your company?”. 341 leaders responded and reported spending 68.5% of their time ‘managing the present’ and 31.5% of their time ‘preparing for the future’ (The CMO Survey: Report of Results by Firm & Industry Characteristics, 2019). The fact that most compensation structures involve quarterly or yearly performance bonuses only adds to this short-term focus.

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Connecting and collaborating with leading-edge consumers helps brands understand what’s new and next

Investing in future-forward capabilities helps overcome this shorttermism and become more proactive in shaping a brand’s future. Grant McCracken, research affiliate at MIT, even argues that every company needs a Chief Cultural Officer (CCO) to anticipate cultural trends and stay ahead of the curve. CCO or no CCO, being future-forward requires 44

a solid practice for identifying, understanding and acting upon cultural shifts and emerging trends that are shaping your consumer, category and brand. And this is exactly where the leading-edge consumers come in. Connecting and collaborating with these forward-looking consumers helps brands understand what’s new and next, and extract strong foresights to future-proof a business.

“I think what’s interesting about this whole idea [of leading-edge consumers] is the need to look at trends, to look at how things are evolving, to try and forecast into the future. Not just talking about what’s happening now or what happened before, is hugely important.”

Tiina Raikko, Director at Fuel Consulting

HOW THE ILLUME NETWORK HELPS GSK TO INFORM THEIR FUTURE THINKING Jo Stanbridge - Global Insights Lead Sensodyne at GSK

As a leading Global Consumer Healthcare Company, we fully understand the importance of consumer trends and how they manifest within different cultures.

This as a key pillar in our desire to achieve a deeper human understanding.

We have worked with InSites Consulting on a number of projects, using their Illume Guides to help with a range of brand challenges, understanding which culture shifts and emerging trends are impacting consumers, our categories and our brands.

We appreciate that not all consumers are able to provide us with that leading-edge perspective or articulate the next. And as a global company, we’re also conscious that we need to understand the local cultural context, which can easily be missed or misinterpreted. This is where we use the Illume Network.

By way of specific example project, we knew ‘wellness’ was one of the biggest trends amongst consumers, but we wanted to get closer to how this manifested in actual consumer behavior. However, we needed to ensure the insights emerging would have longevity, informing future thinking, not the now. In order to do this, we worked with the Illume Network, tapping into a highly engaged, early-adopting audience.

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how

TO SET UP COLLABORATION INITIATIVES Tapping into the knowledge and experiences of these ‘experts by passion’ requires a specific approach tailored to the characteristics of this unique consumer profile.

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Exploring the edges of cultural changes and trends requires that brands work closely with a small(er) group of passionate consumers.

As such, qualitative techniques with a strong focus on gaining visual output via ‘feel’ and ‘do’ activities will prevail.

‘DO’ ACTIVITIES ‘Do’ activities, which ask people to engage in a concrete action, are key when collaborating with leading-edge consumers. Exercises of self-ethnography – such as keeping a (video) diary or taking pictures around a theme or topic – allow to detect those cultural shifts and trends that are hard to translate into words.

The result is often an inspiring mood board, or a vlog around their lifestyle or passion point.

‘FEEL’ ACTIVITIES ‘Feel’ activities are used to capture more implicit and intuitive behavior, or decisions that are taken automatically. Projective techniques such as mapping exercises allow to uncover the latent and subconscious drivers of consumers’ thoughts and behavior.

Think for example about asking leading-edge consumers to map coffee spaces, or in other words: everything that comes to their mind when thinking about coffee. By giving them the liberty to use a combination of text and visuals, this exercise allows to capture all spontaneous associations which people at the forefront of change have with coffee.

‘THINK’ ACTIVITIES ‘Think’ activities allow to apprehend those thoughts that people can easily put into words, capturing deliberate and conscious decisions.

An example are in-depth interviews, which allow to engage with leading-edge consumers around their perceptions, reflections and opinions in relation to their passion points or lifestyle.

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THE RIGHT ENGAGEMENT MIX Just like for any collaboration initiative, it is important to use a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators when engaging with leading-edge consumers. Here especially, intrinsic motivation is important, as these consumers mainly collaborate out of love for their particular interest and passion. This does not imply that monetary rewards are irrelevant – compensating them for their time and valuable input is only fair – but to effectively engage with leading-edge consumers and use their potential to the fullest, playing on their intrinsic motivation is essential. This can be done by sharing exclusive first insights and secondary research on their passion point, which allows them to learn something new and 48

develop their expertise even further.

MEET THE ILLUME NETWORK As experts in consumer-brand collaboration, we connect with leadingedge consumers via our global Illume Network which covers more than 60 countries. Each of the cultural curators in the network, called the ‘Illume Guides’, is handpicked via peer-to-peer recommendations and based on their unique profile. They all have a passion for one or more categories, live a leading-edge lifestyle, and can articulate what is new or next.

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Meet leading-edge consumer Emil Meet Emil from Poland; he owns a cocktail bar and creates amazing drinks with local ingredients. His passion and fresh take on cocktails have helped him shape new and inspiring innovation spaces for major beverage brands. With his close link to the vibrant Warsaw scene – understanding the power of influencers and consumer happiness drivers in Poland – he has helped brands future-proof their engagement strategy.

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Meet leading-edge consumer Fernanda Meet Fernanda from Brazil, a sustainability and wellness blogger living in Rio De Janeiro. She helps brands gain insights in cultural factors that are influencing Brazilian consumers, giving brands a window into this key market. Fernanda has collaborated on a project for a major pharmaceutical brand that wanted to unravel local attitudes, norms and behavior around sustainability, helping them tailor their strategies and positioning to the local audience.

HOW WE HAND-PICK AND ENGAGE UNIQUE CONSUMER PROFILES Cherry Huang - Illume Network Manager (UK)

As Illume Network Manager, I’m responsible for building and managing our network of leading-edge consumers, also known as Illume Guides. I’m always on the look-out for trend-savvy individuals with a particular passion point, that actively seek out what’s new and next. Given the specific, often very niche, nature of these profiles, we use a diverse set of recruitment sources. Think social media platforms, but also university alumni networks, cultural festivals, or conferences. By carefully hand-picking unique profiles, ranging from food bloggers and fashion stylists to cultural anthropologists, we’ve built a global network of 700 Illume Guides. Each new applicant is screened through an in-depth call and, if relevant, an assessment of their social media presence, so that we get an understanding of how they live their lives and we can assess their leading-edge credentials.

To keep the network engaged in between projects, we run engagement activities.

We might interview Illume Guides, or ask them to write an article about their local culture or passion point to post on our blog, Illume Stories. We also invite Guides to take over our Illume Network Instagram account to immerse followers in their lives. This engagement content helps raise awareness of the Illume Network and attract fresh, new profiles. At the same time, it provides the Guides with a stage to promote their own brands, causes and events. Finally, we also send branded gifts, like a tote bag to honour our top-performing Guides.

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With this Illume Network of leading-edge consumers, we support brands in a range of different business challenges which we classify in two areas: trend exploration, and proposition development.

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TREND EXPLORATION

Trend exploration is about deep diving into the world of leading-edge consumers to explore emerging lifestyles and trends. This exploration allows to identify cultural shifts and trends which are then used to determine relevant trend platforms and formulate foresights.

CASE How RBS explored future trends in finance and banking with leading-edge consumers Being future-forward-oriented, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) identified a set of disruptive technologies and themes that will shape the future of finance and banking. To take this further, the brand needed to understand consumer readiness and barriers for adoption. We started by deep diving into RBS’s tech themes, exploring the human problems they could solve. Building on our initial analysis and hypotheses, we selected five Illume Guides to explore this more in-depth, each focusing on one of the five strategic themes. For instance, for ‘Culture & Work 2.0’, we engaged with a freelance creative that spent

years optimizing her own remote-working systems. The Guides took part in interviews and trend-spotting activities which aimed to understand how the themes are playing out in their lives today, and where they expect this to go in the future. These insights and foresights were then validated with RBS’s everyday consumers, namely private customers and SMEs. This was done through a survey on our proprietary Square platform, which focused on understanding consumer readiness to engage with the strategic themes. The project resulted in key opportunities for RBS across the five strategic themes, all grounded in emerging cultural expectations and mass consumer realities. The bank is currently using this work to prioritize innovation and focus resources on aspects that will make the biggest difference to consumers and SMEs. They also continue to track the trends quantitatively to determine how attitudes and behavior are developing over time.

“This piece of insight is fundamental to understanding how our customers are feeling, and in turn how we go about bringing some of these technology innovations to market. Consumer focus has now been added to the organization-wide Technology Futures dashboard, and we are committed to running the research again next year to track the trends.”

Nikki Humphries, Trends & Digital Insight Lead at Royal Bank of Scotland

PROPOSITION DEVELOPMENT

Leading-edge consumers are highly valuable in developing concepts and propositions, ranging from new service or product concepts to packaging or brand activations. They go beyond merely reviewing concepts; they supercharge them, meaning they are able to enrich concepts based on their particular interests or trend-savvy lifestyle while also adding cultural nuances.

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CASE How Perrigo supercharged their ACO brand for German market entry Perrigo, manufacturer of consumer health products, wanted to expand its presence in the skincare category by launching their leading Scandinavian skincare brand ACO in the German market via a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model. Prior to this market launch, Perrigo needed to determine the optimal positioning for ACO in Germany. To kickstart the process, the team wanted to explore emerging market trends to differentiate and optimize the products for the German market, while respecting the traditional Nordic heritage and positioning of the brand. To do so, we deeply immersed in the skincare category with ten digital-savvy, passionate skincare and make-up consumers from our Illume Network. This helped us understand how they engage with the 54

category and identify emerging trends. Next, we gathered detailed feedback on Perrigo’s brand concepts and product ranges to understand areas for improvement. And finally, the Illume Guides supercharged the concepts by sharing mood boards featuring images, words, designs, products, and influencers they associate with their supercharged concept. The concise, visually engaging output outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each proposition.

This provided Perrigo with a clear route forward on how to respond to signals of change and progression in the German beauty category.

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As ‘experts by passion’, leading-edge consumers can give brands insights into what’s new and next in a particular category, topic or area. They can zoom out to understand the bigger picture of societal change and global trends, but also act as cultural commentators, interpreting global trends through a local market lens. This not only allows to identify cultural shifts and trends, but can also help supercharge existing products and services. Collaborating with these passionate consumers demands a blend of activities focused on ‘feeling’ and ‘doing’, thereby not ignoring their strong intrinsic motivation to participate.

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MEET THE 1

THE CREATIVE CONSUMERS Did you know there are people that buy cat litter, but don’t even have a cat? They use it as garbage-can deodorizer, to soak up oil spills, to get rid of algae in their fishpond, or even to make their own ‘cat litter clay face masks’. What characterizes these people is their unique skill to think out of the (litter) box – they address situations in an atypical way and challenge the status quo. They are experts through a hungry mind. They are what we label ‘creative consumers’, that noteworthy 1% of the 90-9-1 rule.

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who ARE THEY

So why is it that these people – irrespective of their field of expertise, job title and background – are disproportionately more likely to come up with original, out-of-the-box ideas? Research has shown that creative individuals are passionate and sensitive, and tend to have a hungry mind (Feist, 1998). They are non-conformist, curious and open to new experiences, but also more self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious and impulsive. These personality traits show to be strong 60

determinants of creative potential, more so than IQ, school performance or motivation. More recent work in the field of neuroscience examined the interconnectivity between creativity and the different regions in the brain. The scientists found that the creative brain is ‘wired’ differently, and that creative people are better at engaging brain systems that typically don’t work together (Beaty et al., 2018). Regardless of which factors explain people’s creative thinking abilities, important is that those creative consumers possess a highly valuable skill that can be fueled into consumer-brand collaborations.

Creative individuals are passionate and sensitive, and tend to have a hungry mind

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ZOOM OUT Imagine Coca-Cola wanting to set up a co-creation initiative to design their next Coca-Cola glass campaign for McDonald’s restaurants.

Would you need to be a McDonald’s fan or regular Coke drinker to come up with a great design? Probably not. Or would you need to be a parent living in China to propose a novel campaign idea to Pampers for the Chinese market? Or a coffee drinker in the U.S. to reinvent the pack design of a U.S.-based coffee brand? Again, the answer to all those questions is: no, not necessarily. Good ideas can literally come from anywhere, irrespective of a creative’s experience with the market, brand, category, or even product. Low topic involvement forms no barrier for these consumers to participate in creative collaboration initiatives. On the contrary, it might even free them from certain 62

modus operandi, allowing them to not only think outside the box, but to completely lose the box. This is also valid for the creator’s location; creative tasks can only benefit from inserting fresh cultural and international perspectives. It’s about zooming out and embracing the intelligent naivety from outsiders to enrich creative processes.

Zooming out to embrace the intelligent naivety from outsiders to enrich creative processes

why

TO CONNECT & COLLABORATE WITH THEM The Apple brand is synonym for creativity. Researchers even found that subliminal exposure to the logo makes people think differently and more creatively (Fitzsimons et al., 2008). And it’s because of that creativity that the brand has dominated

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BCG’s top 50 list of most innovative companies for the last 15 years (BCG, 2020). Today, Apple is more than just a tech provider; it’s an epitome of tasteful design and innovation, and it‘s through creativity that the brand gained its competitive edge.

“Now, more than ever, creativity is the competitive tool that’s going to make a difference. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a large company, or a solo creative person, it’s what makes you stand out.”

Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question

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CREATIVITY IS IN HIGH DEMAND No wonder that creativity is in high demand. By analyzing data from their network of over 660 million professionals and 20 million jobs, LinkedIn concluded that creativity is the single most important skill to master in the world (LinkedIn, 2020). According to research by IT company Fujitsu among 1,936 C-Suite decision makers, 77% of leaders believe creativity is key to future business success (Fujitsu, 2018).

There is just one major challenge; these non-conformist, curious and creative minds are a rare breed.

“99.99% of the world’s smartest people don’t work for us”

Stiven Kerestegian, former Direction Design Lead at Future Lab, LEGO

To step up their creativity game, it’s essential that brands tap into the creative potential of external stakeholders

To step up their creativity game, it’s thus essential that brands tap into the creative potential of external stakeholders. And this is where creative consumers come in. As no organization will be able to permanently employ a pool of creatives, brands can collaborate with creative consumers to get access to a continuous supply of fresh ideas and inspiration. This practice is often referred to as ‘creative crowdsourcing’, and is discussed in detail in our ‘Creativity Gap’ bookzine (InSites Consulting, 2020). By tapping into the potential of this creative crowd, brands reach people that have skill sets that are unavailable within the company, and this at a reduced cost. This is also how HackerOne works. This platform connects over 750,000 white-hat hackers from around the world with companies that need assistance in finding and fixing security vulnerabilities in their software. There is no software or in-house team of experts that can match the skills and creativity of this diverse group of hackers. Not only do organizations reduce their cost burden by engaging HackerOne, they also get access to talent otherwise not available.

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It’s by connecting and collaborating with this inventive group of consumers that marketers and other company stakeholders can extract strong, future-proof, creative insights – or ‘outsights’ – and inject the necessary spark of creativity into the business.

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HOW CREATIVE CONSUMERS INSPIRED NEW SNACKING FLAVORS FOR ARNOTT’S Katerina Stavrellis - Consumer & Marketing Insights Specialist at The Arnott’s Group

For The Arnott’s Group, Australia’s largest biscuit producer, working with InSites’ eÿeka network of creative consumers has been our first creative crowdsourcing experience. The biggest driver to trying this new approach was our observation that ideation with everyday consumers does not always give the desired results.

Similar for internal ideation efforts – we were coming up with the same ideas over and over again. This is no surprise, as we are all consumers influenced by what we see in the supermarket, and marketers reading the same trend reports. The team needed an extra spark of fresh ideas to excite our consumers, and eÿeka did exactly that. They inspired our thinking with new elements we hadn’t considered before.

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We asked the eÿeka members to come up with new and exciting flavors for Shapes, a savory biscuit cracker range. It was fascinating to see how an international crowd of creative people interpreted the Australian market and came up with ideas. For example, a few ideas were based around native ingredients. They also took a different perspective. We might have fixed ideas on how broad a product range is, but creative consumers do not have this frame of reference, easily thinking outside the box, to identify new opportunities. While not an objective of this project, some of the eÿeka ideas also inspired our social media content. There was an idea around a ‘love or hate’ range – of polarizing flavors like coriander – which we posted as a conversation starter on our channels, and it generated great responses, definitely creating some buzz.

The true value of creative crowdsourcing is not only in the fresh ideas, but also in the work with the InSites team afterwards, going from a long list of ideas to curated output. By merging and building on the initial ideas, you really come to something completely new. I’m confident we will tap into the creativity of the crowd more in the future, not only for product development, but also for brand communication and activation.

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TO SET UP COLLABORATION INITIATIVES Creative crowdsourcing is typically organized as a contest, with brands challenging creative consumers to come up with original solutions to a (business) problem. This problem could be related to product and service innovation, communication campaigns, packaging innovation…

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Creative consumers are ‘makers’. Whether they’re inventing a new packaging design, developing a TV commercial, or coming up with a distinct brand identity for a new product, they love to create. Unlike collaboration initiatives with everyday and leading-edge consumers where we mix ‘do’, ‘feel’ and ‘think’ activities, the focus here will lie entirely on ‘make’ activities.

‘MAKE’ ACTIVITIES These creative exercises ideally start from a strong insight or friction, fueled by everyday consumers. The ‘makers’ are challenged to bring creative ideas that build further on this insight. Depending on the business challenge, ‘make’ activities can be very broad, for example: “Invent a solution (service, app,

website…) that will help working people to improve their quality of life”. Or very specific, for instance: “Create a new packaging label design for Doncafé instant coffee, to express the sensual experience of indulgence that women will find irresistible and fun”. The output of these activities can be equally diverse, ranging from a poster highlighting the benefits of a new concept to a fully designed campaign movie or even a 3D mock-up of a new packaging.

THE RIGHT ENGAGEMENT MIX Research has shown it’s mainly the joy of creating and learning new skills, or intrinsic motivation, that drives creative consumers to participate in collaboration initiatives (Pinto & dos Santos, 2018). One way to tap into this intrinsic motivation is by letting a brand’s marketing manager, brand director or design expert give professional, in-depth feedback on consumers’ creative ideas at the end of a contest. This helps them develop their skills and grow in their creative work. However, extrinsic motivators should not be overlooked. In creative crowdsourcing contests, the best ideas often get rewarded with a monetary compensation. In fact, according to research by Acar, monetary rewards can be effective in stimulating greater participation in crowdsourcing initiatives, as well as in motivating participants to create more useful ideas (Acar, 2018). So, cash prizes are effective in encouraging creative consumers, and are an essential part of the engagement mix, next to intrinsic motivators.

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MEET EŸEKA To support brands with their creative challenges, we use our proprietary creative crowdsourcing network of designers, copywriters and creative thinkers, called eÿeka. This network counts over 449,471 members (75% of whom are Millennials) in more than 164 countries around the world. Its members are a mix of professionals and students, many of whom have a creative background yet haven’t gotten the chance to practice their creative skills for a living and are looking for a creative outlet.

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Meet creative consumer James Meet James, a graphic designer from the UK. His experience with art lies in directing photoshoots, creating fashion magazines and press adverts, as well as lots of direct marketing and promotional materials. In his current role, he mainly focuses on the execution of creative concepts, yet what he truly loves is graphic design work for big brands, and this in various sectors.

This is why James joined eÿeka in 2016, where he already participated in 245 contests and won 35 of them.

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Meet creative consumer Farrah Meet Farrah, a young computer scientist from the Philippines, currently living in New Zealand. She loves making crafts, creating DIY projects and sketching. Her background in programming allows her to transfer this creativity into the digital world. In her first job as ‘game checker’, Farrah developed a passion for creating and testing computer games. It comes as no surprise that many of the ideas she submits to eÿeka are inspired by the gaming industry.

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The eÿeka creators are invited to work on diverse business challenges which come in the form of straight-forward, but thought-provoking briefs. Core to each brief is a strong insight or consumer friction, together with ‘no-go areas’ and guidelines that need to be respected.

Eÿeka members can submit their creative outputs into the online eÿeka contest platform. The winning creators share the agreed prize pool and in exchange transfer their intellectual property rights to the commissioning brand. The strongest ideas are then transformed into actionable concepts for screening, briefing or execution by the internal teams. As highlighted in the ‘diversity trumps ability’ theorem (cf. supra), groups of diverse problem solvers outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. The eÿeka network taps into this diversity by uniting people with different backgrounds, reference points and perspectives. To maintain this diversity, creators work alone, without accessing the other submissions during a contest. Yet, depending 72

on the confidentiality of the challenge, we can organize a ‘Feedback circle’, allowing participants that submitted an idea to browse through 50% of the other ideas and exchange feedback. This peer-based feedback allows to learn from each other while not influencing the creative process during the contest. By carefully managing and maintaining diversity, the eÿeka network is able to deliver 35 to 100 well-articulated, illustrated ideas for each challenge, and this in merely a few weeks’ time.

“Partnering with eÿeka really opened our eyes to the potential of crowdsourcing. They’ve really demonstrated through this process that creative consumers can bring fresh thinking to our innovation pipeline and crack some of the briefs that we weren’t able to.”

Sarah Ryan, former Integrated Insights Director at The Arnott’s Group

WHY GOOD IDEAS CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE Our experience shows that good ideas can come from anywhere.

This is why each eÿeka contest is an open call for creative ideas, meaning that creators from all over the world can participate.

And with result: a typical brief generates ideas from creators in 20 to 40 different countries. In fact, 90% of contest winners are located outside the target market, demonstrating the value of fresh cultural and international perspectives in ideation.

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HOW WE SUPPORT CREATIVE MINDS TO GET TO IDEAS THAT SPARK Ekaterina Pashina - Senior Research Consultant (FR)

From the very first time potential members visit our eÿeka platform until the day they win their first creative contest, we are here to guide them towards a positive experience. Upon registering, we welcome new members into the eÿeka community, explaining how they can navigate the platform, update their profile, or participate in a contest. Next, we support them in their creative process by sharing simple and fun creative techniques. Think, for example, about tips on how they can release their inner child, or how they can open their minds by shaking up the words of the business challenge.

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Seeing dozens of ideas being submitted every day via the eÿeka platform, we have a good understanding of what makes an entry stand out. Based on our experience, we have collected a list of simple guidelines that help creatives enhance their submissions and make their idea shine. At the same time, this ensures that the commissioning brands receive ideas that are better executed, easier to process and more suited to the business challenge. Each project also has a dedicated moderator that goes through the ideas in detail and shares in-depth feedback with the creatives. At the end of each project, we ask the contest participants to share feedback on their experience with eÿeka through a feedback form, also giving them a voice in shaping the future of eÿeka.

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CONSUMER CO-CREATION

The eÿeka creators collaborate with brands to co-create solutions for multiple business challenges ranging from product and service innovation to communication campaigns and packaging innovation. Depending on the co-creation need, the output from the eÿeka network can vary from raw ideas to rich visual concepts.

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CASE How Fanta supercharged their innovation funnel through creative crowdsourcing Soft-drink brand Fanta was looking for fresh inspiration to fill its innovation funnel. Two key areas for disruptive innovation were put forward to explore: ‘Sensory Pleasure’, which is all about new and exciting taste experiences, and ‘Collective Fun’, which revolves around product/ packaging concepts to drive fun and sociability. As teens are Fanta’s key target audience, we started by exploring their world via secondary research, fueled by our in-house NextGen thought leadership (more on this in our ‘Fragile’ bookzine). The insights from this first phase were shared with the eÿeka community, together with a clear brief. The core message: “Create a new Fanta drink for teens that will offer a new taste and a fun experience”. The eÿeka creators brought forward 112 unique, out-of-the-box ideas. Together with 28 ideas from Fanta’s

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internal stakeholders, we gathered a total pool of 140 ideas. After a first selection based on their disruptive nature, brand fit and uniqueness, 54 of the initial ideas were taken further in a two-day workshop with the Fanta team. This resulted in 21 concepts that were ready for evaluation by everyday consumers.

In a final step, 172 teens from two target markets (i.e. Poland and Romania) were invited to evaluate and further fine-tune the ideas in an online consumer community. By tapping into the combined power of everyday and creative consumers, Fanta could fuel its innovation funnel in a very short time with creative, out-of-the box concepts, validated by teens, their core target group.

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“I was amazed by the speed and creativity of the eÿeka community. Within two weeks, the eÿeka community provided us with more than 110 ideas responding to the brief we sent them. Ideas were all well detailed. Out of the 110 ideas, we selected 54 to present to our stakeholders to further evolve them.

I found this process very efficient.”

Sandra Savonitto, Sensory science manager at Coca-Cola

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Creative consumers possess this unique skill to zoom out and think out of the box to inspire brands with fresh thinking and ideas. These consumers are ‘makers’; they thrive when they’re challenged in ‘make’ activities to create something new. Like the leading-edge consumers, collaborating with creatives requires a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, but with a strong focus on intrinsic drivers.

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COLLABORATING WITH THE RIGHT CONSUMER ON THE RIGHT TASK The above clearly proves ‘amazing things will happen when you listen to the customer, and even greater ones when you collaborate with them’.

The power of consumer collaboration lies in embracing its diverseness by engaging with the right consumer for the right task or business challenge. Being ‘experts by experience’, everyday consumers can help brands immerse in what is happening in their lives. They can guide marketers and other company stakeholders to overcome their inherent biases, and develop a better understanding of consumers’ needs, 80

frictions and aspirations. Leading-edge consumers are ‘experts by passion’ that support brands in understanding what’s new and next.

Collaborating with these future-forward-oriented people helps brands identify cultural shifts and emerging trends. Creative consumers are those inventive minds that think out of the box and challenge the status quo. They are ‘experts through a hungry mind’ and inspire brands with what could be, injecting the necessary sparks of creativity into the business.

The following table summarizes the components that shape each consumer profile. Depending on the context, product category or topic, one person can even combine these three consumer profiles. A person can be an everyday consumer when it’s about beauty products, but leading-edge in the food category as they are passionate about cooking and food blogging. Someone else might be blessed with a creative mind, while at the same time being a wellness fanatic, or passionate about sustainable living.

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These characteristics define when and how to best collaborate with each of these consumer profiles. Their complementary nature allows to involve different profiles around one business challenge. When thinking about new product development, for example, brands might collaborate with everyday consumers to explore and identify unmet needs. These insights can then be fueled into an ideation challenge with creative consumers. After the internal team has evaluated and transformed those ideas into first concepts, these can be tested and optimized again with everyday consumers. To think more long-term and fill the innovation funnel, leading-edge consumers can be consulted to explore emerging cultural shifts and trend platforms to future-proof the business. Or think about the launch of a product or service in a new market – after the launch, the success can be tracked with everyday 84

consumers. Regardless of your business challenge, great power lies in involving a diverse set of consumers.

In the first volume of this bookzine series, we introduced the concept of consumer centricity, or the idea that consumers need to be anchored deeply in the organization to drive change throughout the business.

We explained that, to become truly ‘consumer-centric’, brands need to actively manage three components: continuity, closeness and diverseness. Continuity is about installing an ongoing (real-time) consumer dialogue, while closeness refers to bringing the entire business closer to the consumer, touching the hearts, minds and actions of all stakeholders involved. In this bookzine, we focused on the ‘diverseness’ component of consumer centricity, and more in particular on the importance of engaging the right people for the right task. The next bookzine in this series of five around ‘Better Together’ will talk about a different aspect of ‘diverseness’, namely the importance of mixing ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘do’ and ‘make’ activities to uncover both conscious and unconscious behavior and gain deep consumer understanding.

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adnews.com.au/news/sir-john-hegarty-calls-out-industry-s-biggest-fallacies BCG. (2020). The Serial Innovation Imperative. https://image-src.bcg.com/Images/

BCG-Most-Innovative-Companies-2020-Jun-2020-R-4_tcm9-251007.pdf Beaty, R. E., Kenett, Y. N., Christensen, A. P., Rosenberg, M. D., Benedek,

M., Chen, Q., Fink, A., Qiu, J., Kwapil, T. R., Kane, M. J. & Silvia, P. J.

(2018, January 30). Robust prediction of individual creative ability from

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Castellion, G. & Markham, S. K. (2013). Perspective: New product failure rates:

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com/90212933/ikeas-latest-collection-was-inspired-by-ikea-hackers Feist, G. J. (1998). A Meta-Analysis of Personality in Scientific and Artistic

Creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review; SAGE Publications

Inc. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0204_5 Fitzsimons, G. M., Chartrand, T. L. & Fitzsimons, G. J. (2008, June 1).

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Makes You “Think Different.” Journal of Consumer Research; Oxford

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Innovation. www.fujitsu.com/global/themes/co-creation/success-report/ Harvard Business School. (2011). Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marketing Hong, L. & Page, S. E. (2004). Groups of diverse problem solvers can

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Horowitz, B. (2006). Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers.

https://blog.elatable.com/2006/02/creators-synthesizers-and-consumers.html InSites Consulting. (2020). The Creativity Gap.

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LinkedIn. (2020). The Top Skills Companies Need Most in 2020—And How to

Learn Them. https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/top-skills and-courses/the-skills-companies-need-most-in-2020and-how-to-learn-them Mind the Product. (2019). Product/Market Fit is Failing Because of Your Company

Structure. www.mindtheproduct.com/product-market-fit-is-failing-because of-your-company-structure/ Mumbrella. (2013). Sydney agency people live in a media bubble and most

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paperback/9780691138541/the-difference Pew Research Center. (2019). 10 facts about Americans and Twitter. www.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/ Pinto, L. F. S. & dos Santos, C. D. (2018, February 5). Motivations of

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https://doi.org/10.1108/inmr-02-2018-004 Refinery29. (2019). The Real Story Behind H&M’s Racist Monkey Sweatshirt.

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org/content/pages-to-date/normal%7Ctable%7Call%7Cpage_type~

content%7Cmonthly I N S I T E S C O N S U LT I N G

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COLOPHON Bookzine authors Henk Pretorius - Managing Partner & Head of Consumer Connection Sarah Van Oerle - Content Activation Manager Katia Pallini - Content Marketing Director Kristof De Wulf - Managing Partner & CEO

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Column contributors Graeme Lawrence - Managing Partner (UK) Gaël Chevé - CMI International L’Oréal Active Cosmetics Henk Pretorius - Managing Partner & Head of Consumer Connection (ZA) Jo Stanbridge - Global Insights Lead Sensodyne at GSK Cherry Huang - Illume Network Manager (UK) Katerina Stavrellis - Consumer & Marketing Insights Specialist at The Arnott’s Group Ekaterina Pashina - Senior Research Consultant (FR) Design Hannes Willaert Language editing Anne-Laure Simoens

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form or by any means, be it electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the publisher’s prior written consent.

D

ifferent people come with a different set of unique skills and

competences. Research has shown that out of every 100 people, 90 merely consume content, 9 will like, share or react to what is created, and only 1 will actually create something. And this is no different for consumers.

Great power lies in involving a diverse set of people when rallying around business challenges. Consumer collaboration leverages this diverseness, as it allows to tap into a wide variety of competences and skills, some of which might not be available inside an organization.

This bookzine illustrates how to get the most out of such collaboration initiatives, by involving the right consumer for the right task. Still too often, collaboration initiatives are limited to asking consumers for the occasional feedback. To become truly consumer-centric, brands need to shift from simply listening to consumers, to collaborating with consumers. It’s about embracing the power of the 90, the 9 and the 1.

ABOUT INSITES CONSULTING Founded in 1997, InSites Consulting is a nextgeneration consumer insight agency and global market leader in online communities. Our proprietary insight management platform and versatile research toolbox allow brands to become truly immersed in the consumer reality. We make consumer-centric decision making a reality for over a third of the world’s leading brands.

By uniting brands and consumers around the world, we can shape the future better, together.

www.insites-consulting.com