There is a revolution going on. Thanks to modern means of communication and information technology, the consumer is becoming increasingly powerful and demands that organizations operate in a customer-driven manner. Positive and negative stories about organizations are shared at lightning speed via social media. Take this a step further and you arrive at creating with the consumer, or co-creation.
Complete co-creation
Interest groups can increasingly quickly reach a critical mass to exert great influence. Communicating about or 'in the name of' the consumer no longer works: communicating with the consumer is the future. In this first part of a pair of articles on co-creation , we will discuss the background of this emerging phenomenon and refute some popular assumptions. In addition, we will introduce the concept of 'complete co-creation' and discuss a number of important advantages of co-creation.
In the next part we will discuss how to get started with complete co-creation and discuss barriers that can exist within organizations. These articles are mainly intended for those who want to implement co-creation within their organization or are already working with it.
Co-creation as a holistic concept
There has been growing attention for working from ' customer insight ' for some time now. Organisations are looking for a deep understanding of the drivers and barriers of customers in order to translate these into relevant products, services, experiences, brands or communication tools. In recent years, this has been extended by leading organisations to thinking and working based on co-creation: companies are increasingly working together with the end user.
Co-creation is ' hot ', but as is often the case with buzzwords, there are many interpretations in circulation, generally implicit in nature. That is to say: many people talk and write about it, but in the absence of a clear definition, the seemingly clear-cut term 'co-creation' often includes very different things. Sometimes it is about market research or participatory research, then again about ' crowdsourcing ' or 'brainstorming' with or without the target group.
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What is co-creation?
But working together with, asking input from, or listening to different parties does not automatically constitute co-creation. Co-creation only occurs when the end user plays an active role and when there is a continuous process. Many companies that think they work on the basis of co-creation, in fact only use certain forms of co-creation as separate 'tools' in an incomplete co-creation process.
What is also often wrongly classified under co-creation is target group connection. Target group connection is the combination of various forms of research to arrive at a profound understanding of the target group. Participatory research in the target group's own living environment plays a crucial role in this. But focus groups, in-depth interviews and surveys can also lead to target group insight. As can forms of crowdsourcing , social media analysis, shadowing customer service and sales teams. Target group connection is a prerequisite for developing relevant and attractive products, services, brands and communication.
But here too, target group connection is not automatically co-creation. Target group connection provides insight into a specific target group and its opinions, but does not give it an active role in shaping a product, service, facility or means of communication. Many companies that think they work on the basis of co-creation, in fact only do target group connection.
Consumer engagement
We can now state that there is a certain degree of confusion about what exactly co-creation is and is not. The definitions that we have found in the literature are holistic in nature: they include many different things that we believe are not all co-creation. For example, platforms such as Nike+ and mystarbucksidea are classified as co-creation by various authors, while in our opinion this is about ' consumer engagement ', but not co-creation.
Products like Senseo are also regularly presented as co-creation, while there was cooperation between different companies, but not co-creation with the end user. Based on our own experiences and research, we therefore use a stricter definition of co-creation than most other authors. We refer to this with the term 'complete co-creation'.
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Complete co-creation
Complete co-creation is the process of shaping a product, service, facility, experience, brand or communication tool and everything around it in productive collaboration with the end user and any other relevant parties. Complete co-creation distinguishes itself from many other definitions of co-creation by involving the end user (and any other relevant parties) as a determining factor. This productive collaboration between organization and consumer is necessary to achieve real value creation. An important star oman mobile phone number list ting point for complete co-creation is that neither the organization nor the consumer can achieve the ideal output without collaboration. After all, they have additional knowledge and skills.
That is why complete co-creation is all about 'productive collaboration' between the organisation, the end user and other relevant parties. This includes all types of activities that are aimed at realising a valuable offer for an organisation, provided that there is direct, active collaboration between the organisation and the end user, possibly supplemented with other possible relevant parties, such as suppliers, sales channels, external specialists or even competitors.
Co-creation is not a tool that you use occasionally
Thirdly, complete co-creation distinguishes itself by viewing co-creation as a continuous process, versus a 'tool' that can be used occasionally. During a complete co-creation process, the end user and other relevant target groups are continuously involved in different ways in different phases of the development. Think of live sessions such as brainstorming sessions, conceptualization, sessions in which creative agencies are briefed or support presentations to stakeholders. But also of virtual contact via social media and forms of crowdsourcing in which the end user is actively involved - for example as an idea generator or as an assessor of other people's ideas.
Textbook example of complete co-creation: Groove.me
As an entrant into the educational market, Blink Educatief has the ambition to reinvent teaching methods, so that children are more inspired to learn. The first project to shape this ambition was the development of an English method for primary school. In the summer of 2010, Jorien Castelein, director of Blink, put together an innovation team consisting of Arjan Polhuijs of Flare Innovation and us.