Tag Archives: collaboration

Co-Creation and Managing What Matters

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Co-creation has become a central theme for brands and innovators over the last decade, and rightfully so. The idea of collaboration in a postmodern world where information and opinions reach millions in the blink of an eye is a necessity. But what do we mean when we talk about co-creation and is it the panacea it’s made out to be?

Co-creation views products, brands and markets as forums for companies and customers to share, combine and renew each other’s resources and capabilities.  This creates value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms. In other words, it ideally establishes a dialog between all actors involved in the company’s offerings.  Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organization, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Value is co-created with customers if and when a customer is able to personalize his or her experience using a firm’s brand promise and product/service proposition to a level that is best suited to get his or her tasks done or need fulfilled. This, in turn, allows the company to derive greater value from its product-service investment in the form of new knowledge, higher profitability and/or increased brand loyalty.  The interaction established through co-creation produces a sort of community where the company and the user/buyer engage in an ongoing, continuously evolving relationship, defined by and defining a shared set of actions and beliefs.

A key element in all of this is the notion of personalization on the part of the customer.  But what does personalization mean? Personalization is about the customer becoming a co-creator of the content of their experiences.  This doesn’t mean providing products and content that can then be tweaked to meet their needs, because that is still largely a passive process – the company makes it, the consumer buys it and then reconstructs it in something of a vacuum. There is no feedback loop.  In a true co-creation model, customers and actors inside the company are taking active roles in developing and sharing new ideas. Competencies of the consumer and stakeholders within the company come to interact and harness a range of ideas, functional and symbolic.

This is done along four axes: engage in dialogue with customers, mobilize communities, manage customer diversity and co-create experiences with customers. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage customers for a shared creative experience, going beyond insights and creating a constant interaction that produces brand experiences and better products and services. The increase in the number of collaborators and the numerous interactions among them, across each stage of development, leads to products and services that better meet customer needs.  We see a greater diversity of individuals, functions across organizations and stakeholders across the product/service/brand ecosystem getting involved.

While I am a proponent of co-creation, there are problems with a co-creative model. A customer who believes he or she has the expertise and chooses to co-produce may be more likely to make self-attributions for success and failure than a customer who lacks the expertise. A customer who lacks the expertise but feels forced to co-produce may make more negative attributions about co-production. The dialog can backfire.

The second pitfall is that co-creation assumes customers can readily articulate what they want and need. Customers take on roles, which means what they tell the stakeholders inside the organization may not reflect anything more than a whim. Think of cars with 17 cup holders and fins a mile high. What we can articulate is often a manifestation of something else, something we can’t articulate well, which may lead to creating the absurd. Rather than taking suggestions at face value, ideas need to be analyzed through the lens of detachment and we need to tease out meaning and innovation from the unsaid as well as the said.

Finally, co-creation often assumes a fixed identity for the customer, meaning that the person with whom we’re working and the person for whom we’re building changes according to context. If the co-creating customer is in the role of “mom” in one instance, she may be in the role of “artist” later in the day. The dramaturgical shift in identity will shape what he or she says and does as it relates to a brand, product or service at any given point in time. So even though the idea is well developed and well thought out in the co-creation process, whether that be an ideation session or an online forum, it may have little relevance once that stage is abandoned and the customer moves on with the rest of his or her day.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them, companies get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. But it is not without risk. As co-creation becomes a mainstay at companies, we will need to figure out how to keep a diverse set of participants engaged, how to share the risks and value of innovation, how to manage the complexity of the system without laying out too many constraints. We will need to learn how to tease out what is actually needed and what are simply flights of fancy. We will need to learn to balance the said and the unsaid. But in the end, the payoffs can and will be tremendous.

Taking to the Field: Client Collaboration

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Perhaps naively, many ethnographers assumed that we would work in a vacuum when they learned their trade. We’d go into the field – people’s homes, workplaces, and leisure areas – and then report to clients what we learned. However, we soon realize that some clients take us literally when we state ethnography will bring them into their customers’ homes. They aren’t always satisfied with just overseeing the project or telling us what they want to learn and why. This is a great opportunity for clients to see customers using their products in real situations and a chance to get to know the customers personally. But it presents ethnographers with certain challenges. 

Involvement Risks

Ethnographers tread delicately. Every time we perform fieldwork we need to become instant friends with participants. We need them comfortable enough to behave “normally” while we point a camera at them, and to feel that they can tell us anything – even if they’re just talking about peanut butter. The field is spontaneous and sensitive, and anything can happen. That means making sure we and our clients do all we can to ensure that the field remains as natural as possible.

Clients have varying levels of fieldwork experience. Some are qualitative market researchers with a little in-context interviewing under their belts, and others don’t have much first-hand knowledge of qualitative research or the human sciences. Consequently, clients might interfere with the interview process, misinterpret the data, or overlook important but subtle information. However, ethnographers can take steps to mitigate these concerns.

1. Explore Motives

Understand why clients need to go into the field and what their expectations are of the project. Do they want direct exposure to generate ideas, ease issues of trust/competency/legality, train their in-house ethnographer, or simply be more engaged in the process? For the sake of both the research and the client-ethnographer relationship, articulating these issues is essential.

It’s paramount that clients communicate goals for a smooth operation. On one occasion, a busy client of ours wanted to see his products used in context, so he attended two field visits early in the project. Knowing his reason and planned number of outings, we ensured they’d include use of his products. Everything went well, and his observations were eye-opening. Because he didn’t have time to invest in more fieldwork, we sent him a video document every time someone used his products during the project.

2. Establish Boundaries

Before fieldwork, ethnographers must communicate the research boundaries and client role. Clients should recognize that ethnographers’ expertise consists of more than an ability to build rapport with strangers; their skills are rooted in a keen understanding of social theory and methodological rigor, and entail years of training.

Ethnographers have a process and particular mindset that directs the interview, interaction, and interpretation, so guiding client input before starting a project will help prevent everyone from asking leading questions or biasing conversations. Limits ensure quality work and allow clients to make the most of a field visit.

It also permits them to function within a frame of hierarchical authority, lessening their need to be project leader. In other words, clients understand that the context reduces or removes a layer of authority. It lets them focus on learning and executing predetermined tasks, instead of feeling compelled to handle everything. They can filter information through a training perspective while taking a holistic approach.

3. Define Responsibilities

Providing clients an indispensable role in the projects, such as videotaping an interview, helps them feel more like team members and less like visitors. It also raises comfort levels of everyone involved. Assigning tasks s also a practical necessity: Clients can replace research assistants in the field. Two researchers plus a client can threaten and crowd a participant, who just wants to demonstrate the best way to clean a bathroom countertop.

4. Encourage Reciprocation

It’s important to know clients well and be thoughtful about their flexibility, political realities, and character traits. Unfortunately, there often isn’t enough time to do so in-depth. Clients might arrive a half-hour earl for an afternoon interview and leave that evening, never to go into the field again. In this case, an ethnographer can only outline some expectations and techniques – through phone and e-mail conversations beforehand, and on the spot (frequently while sitting on cushy hotel-lobby chairs).

When clients have more time to invest in the ethnography, there are two parts to building a solid team and guaranteeing productive fieldwork (despite their lack of experience.) Clients must be willing to adapt to new or unfamiliar methodologies – techniques for data gathering and interpretation – regardless of their backgrounds (e.g. design, business strategy, engineering). And ethnographers must appreciate and incorporate clients’ theoretical and practical contributions. Success requires devoting time and energy to discovering the capabilities of all the team members – ethnographer and client alike.

Each team member can learn to apply findings across a range of activities. After all, a key to business achievement is using seemingly disconnected information to build new products, brands, and business models. Learning how best to conduct research and understanding individual roles in the field ultimately helps the client use the gathered information most effectively.

 

Protection and Collaboration

As ethnography becomes a staple of market research, we just might see marketers and product designers make an exodus to the field – with or without us. Ethnographers need to prepare for the possible outcomes. They should do so by not only preventing research from being disturbed, but also by harnessing clients’ intelligence and know-how – using their involvement as a springboard for more effective and actionable ethnography. In the future, most marketing decisions and product innovations will be based on real-world experiences with ordinary people.

What Does Narrative Convey?

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Narrative is a word much used today.  Whether we’re talking about story telling or something more meaningful, it is a potentially marvelous tool, but what do we mean by it and what are the concerns we need to think through when thinking about it?  Narrative, as it is used here and as I’ve written before, is analysis of a chronologically told story with a focus on how elements are sequenced.  It attempts to understand why some elements are evaluated differently from others, how the past shapes perceptions of the present, how the present shapes perceptions of the past, and how both shape perceptions of the future. The narrative process enables these participants to reconstruct experiences, meaning, and patterns of tool use according to the cultural patterns attributable to the underlying theme. Transformation can occur privately or when social groups indirectly or critically reflect on the conditions that constrain their actions and understanding of events.

The narrative process collects data to describe lives in, ideally, a collaborative atmosphere, giving the participant a direct voice while attempting to present an analytical and interpretive layer from the perspective of the researcher.  In analyzing narratives, the researcher works to actively give voice to the participant in a particular time, place or setting and provide a description of experiences based upon his or her recollections and statements about past feelings and perspectives.

The narrative approach provides the researcher with an organizational structure designed to be responsive to analysis. The resulting analysis moves towards a reduction of the narration to answer the question “what is the point of this story?”  In turn, this information is distilled into determinations of relevance to the various audiences according to business and design needs.

As each narrative unfolds, it is contextualized by the purposes of the interviewer in terms of the research and of the participant in terms of self-presentation.  The story may not represent reality from an external perspective, but is an attempt on the part of the teller to reduce information into something meaningful for the outsider.  In turn, the researcher serves a conduit for the final audience, adding an editorial and interpretive overlay.  This representation is meant to convince the listeners of its trustworthiness, relevance, and association to more expansive concerns and events.

The use of a narrative inquiry and the development of case stories offer multiple perspectives in understanding a practice, social group, etc.  This process gives meaning to the audiences; it yields history, meaning, myth and function.  The recounted experience is central to the development of a social and personal identity.  It also uses the form of a story-map to present a meaningful cross-case comparison. The patterns of a participant’s self identity, their culture and community, and any transformations that take place over time are represented by the participant in the telling of his or her story. No single story provides a full understanding of the meaning of an event, activity, etc., but it provides pieces for a total picture of a concept.  Repeated patterns of behavior and repeated storylines are important to understand the total concept, shed light on the participant’s cultural consciousness, and elucidate the interrelationships between collective and individual experience.

A narrative is developed or constructed in the telling.  The role of interviewer, of course, affects the stories as we ask for clarification or elaboration in that it is impacted by when and how we ask questions.  In telling their stories, participants reveal themselves according to the social frame they believe fits the researcher/participant relationship.  Consequently, the process is unavoidably a shared narrative construction and reconstruction. When examining the veracity of the participant’s account, there is the possibility that the participant will tell you what he or she thinks you want to hear.  However, the participant is also compelled to draw on components of the story he or she  believes are relevant to the historical and current situations in question, then piece them together in a meaningful and coherent way.  Corrections, deviations, etc. occur and shed light on significant issues.  All of this leads to serious questions.

First, does narrative vary according to culture and historical period, or do the fundamental conditions of narrativity constitute cognitive universals? That narrative was slow to emerge as a theoretical concept, and typically enjoys recognition largely within academic culture, seems to speak in favor of a relativistic approach, but the culture-specific feature could be the awareness of the concept, rather than the properties that define it.  The relativistic approach raises the problem of comparability: if narrative takes radically different forms in every culture, where is the common denominator that justifies the labeling of these forms as narrative? If one opts for the culture-universal approach, the obvious differences between the narratives of different periods and cultures are a matter of thematic filling in and of variations on a common basic structure.

Second, does narrative presuppose a verbal act of narration by a narrator, or can a story be told without the mediation of a narratorial consciousness? What is at stake in this question is whether dramatic media or media that does not use language alone as their primary mode of representation are capable of narration. My position is that film narration does not necessarily require  a narratorial figure.  Some scholars have attempted to reconcile the narrator-based definition with the possibility of non-verbal narration by analyzing drama and movie as presupposing the utterance of a narratorial figure, even when the film or the play does not make use of voice-over narration.

Both of these issues hold significance in large part because they impact how we construct and distribute a narrative piece to the client audience(s).  Additionally, these issues impact how the final report or video is understood.  Is the intended message conveyed?  Is there a necessary conflict between what in differing contexts might be labeled “science” and “drama”?  If the piece is understood as science or art, what value do the audiences place on both of these concepts?  The overarching issue at hand is less about determining what constitutes ownership of the narrative voice than it is about whether or not we, the anthropologists in the field, are able to successfully convey meaning that results in some degree of change or understanding.  All ethnographers make use of narrative conventions when communicating the presumed results of our fieldwork, whether that method of communication is a piece of video or a monograph.  The authorial voice is ever present.  It’s simply a matter of how loudly we wish it to be heard in the telling of someone else’s story.

Doing Rapid Ethnography

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The hallmark of ethnographic research is field work done in natural settings, where it can yield a broad picture and provide a more complete context of activity. But, ethnography can, at times, scare our clients.  Because of this depth, it is often seen as slow, expensive and inclined to produce more information than can easily be translated into action.  And to be fair, that assessment can be true.  However, an ethnographic approach need not always be so.

Due to budget constraints and time demands, a “ rapid” approach to ethnography can be both more practical and still yield findings and insights that can produce highly actionable results.  Is it always appropriate? No, but it is often better than no research and may actually be more beneficial depending on the goals of the research. In a rapid ethnography model, researchers can lessen time demands taking short focused studies to rapidly gain understanding of the brand, the product and the actions/meanings surrounding them. The trick is remembering design the processes around tighter focus, interactivity with participants and collaborative data analysis, not only with the researchers but members of the client team.

First, focus can be more difficult to achieve than we think.  A central tenet of good ethnography is that you don’t go into the field with your answers running – you’re goal is to learn about context and then determine how a product fits into the system.  So focusing too early can mean loading the front end of a project with too many preconceived notions. So focus in the sense we’re talking about here means having research teams identify the general area of interest and identifying specific questions that need to be answered by the fieldwork.  This means identifying the “why” behind the questions rather than simply recreating a context-based survey.

This means developing both a concise field guide (things to look for) and a field book (consistent, shared mode of documentation) before the fieldwork begins that are specific enough to target and isolate key behaviors and activities, but open enough to let the participant serve as the guide.  Constructing the field guide and field book in this way will help direct what research teams attend to during the data collection process and how they frame the field analysis. This is also a good place to consider using liminal members of a group and/or outliers. Because they are on the periphery of the subject in question, they often have ken insights on what others are doing and why they’re doing it.  Sometimes the best insights come from those least inclined to interact with a product or brand.

Another consideration in conducting a successful rapid ethnography is for researchers to use multiple techniques to increase the likelihood of discovering new concepts, interesting behavior, etc.  As an example, using art work or writing in the process can yield symbolic associations that wouldn’t necessarily come out immediately in the context of traditional ethnography.  Asking people to create and construct changes the nature of the inquiry and produces results that can then be compared against both the interview and the observations.  It is another way of quickly triangulating data. Other techniques might include resource flow documentation, defining activity valleys and peaks, or using cross-participant interviews (participants interview each other).

The third point to stress is using collaborative analytical methods.  Computer assisted analysis is always an option, but requires added expense and can be time consuming to learn  However, there are alternatives to ATLASti and other such tools.  Simply having a secure networking site where field notes, insights and observations can be shared between team members at the end of the day is extremely helpful.  Of course, the risk is that people might start jumping to conclusions too soon, but that can be mitigated through dialog. The point is that this allows researchers to collaboratively understand the ever-expanding field data and modify or refine the research in real time.  Another technique is to use metaphor and concept mapping in a shared system to help researchers align the underlying meanings of what they’re finding in the field rather than waiting until the end of the fieldwork to tease out insights. The creative side, insights-driven side of the research is essentially done in tandem with the fieldwork.

Is rapid ethnography always an ideal approach?  Certainly not. But it is a useful tool when budgets and time are limited.  And increasingly, it is simply part of the tool kit we have.

Strategy and Culture Change Inside the Agency

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In a world with consolidation of client budgets, agencies must begin to target the projects and clients that will allow them to flex not only their creative muscles, but also demonstrate their strategic prowess.  This business and economic climate results in organizations increasing their focus on cost reduction at all levels. This most definitely includes marketing and advertising budgets not necessarily shrinking, but an increased focus on value. Clients are hiring entry-level designers to handle “grunt work,” and replacing tasks previously handled by the agency with projects requiring higher-level thinking.  Obviously, the risk here is that the agency must have the capability and desire to take on this new role.  They must want to be more of a strategic partner than a supplier of clever content.  And that is a significant challenge.

Changing the worldview of people in any cultural context is difficult.  It isn’t as simple as providing new tools or a new slogan. It requires thinking about how long-term modification will influence the cultural and psychological systems people hold dear to their hearts.  Culture change is the term used in public policy making that emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior. It places stress on the social and cultural capital determinants of decision making and the manner in which these interact with other factors like the availability of information or the financial incentives facing individuals to drive behavior.  Shifting social zeitgeist  (whereby social norms and values that predominate within the cultural capital in society evolve in over time) and requires understanding the motivations and cultural underpinnings of an industry defined by solo acts.  The “big idea” is more than a way of expressing the push to find that singular message in advertising, it represents the way people within agencies work.  It is the lone wolf with the brilliant idea jockeying for power both internally and with the client.  Breaking through that cultural construct is difficult, but a necessity in the changing face of advertising and marketing.  Collaboration and strategic thinking, so readily taken on in the industrial design and product development worlds, are becoming absolute necessities in the world of advertising and marketing.

The opportunity for marketing and advertising firms, especially smaller firms, now lies with the chance to transform their relationships with clients from being the production shop to a strategic partner that can be a valuable solution to a variety of problems.