We had the great opportunity of co-presenting with Beth from Coca-Cola and a handful of other agencies operating in the co-creation space at the MRS conference in a shared session called Big Brand Co-Creation. It was a great session that we all saw as a chance to collectively raise the profile of Co-Creation as a discipline and show the extent to which it has come of age as a discipline within the industry. Each of us was charged with showing a slightly different dimension of co-creation, highlighting the scope and variety of the ways it could be used to achieve great things with big brands. The emphasis of our paper was on taking co-creative principles of collaboration, real time, speed & open-ended thinking into a traditional insight focused brief, highlighting how co-creation was not just about bringing new ideas into a business, or a party trick for something fun and low risk, but could actually be applied at the heart of the insight function, aimed at building a complete foundation of insight.

1. co-creating insights
working with Coca-Cola GB and Older Teens to understand & imagine
the future of the category together
(and change the way CCGB approach marketing and research in the process)

2. co-creation is an idea who’s time has come
co-creation is not necessarily a new idea, but it is a now idea
that doesn’t mean it’s a fad or a fake
participatory brands as
culture social things
evolved and always in
empowered beta
consumers

3. it is an evolution from several existing trends
and systems
1) qualitative research
move from psychological to
pragmatic
2) user-centred
design 3) open-source
software
x) BUT what’s
revolutionary is how
it is being used

4. co-creation is not just
insight about innovation &
inviting ideas from
outside the business
innovation into the business
brand &
engagement it’s about direct collaboration
planning between users and
producers to create better
value for both parties
in terms of understanding,
innovating & imagining the
future together

5. 5 key principles of co-creation; what happens next
is just a question of how you apply them
consumers as
equal partners
make it active:
doing things with
people interaction in
real time
work in real
places researchers as
curators &
storytellers

6. Coca-Cola needed to navigate a way through the older
teen world which looked a bit like this….
not always easy to do when
working with teens in research
can be a little like this

7. Project Hijack
an ongoing project that helped step-change the way Coca-Cola
worked with older teenagers to co-create the future relationship
of the 2 parties
foundation of ongoing
insights from 2 day workshop to community for
online help build ideas of continuous
community value and future development of
together communications &
activation ideas

8. 1) making it active & participatory
moving away from passive response to active
participation in doing something together
loads of creative and open missions for teens to
complete online
teens and senior stakeholders solving problems
together in the workshop

9. 2) equal partnership between consumers
& clients
allowing people to share in the success of the
project together – lots of feedback
consumers tell clients what to do and working
together in groups to create and develop ideas

10. 3) work in real places
doing it online – perfect for older teen
they take us to where they really do stuff
taking joint ownership of workshop spaces

11. 4) in real time
engaging with online community 24/7/52
working together to create stuff in workshops
less going backwards and forwards between clients,
agencies & consumers

12. 5) researchers as curators &
storytellers
letting members drive content of online
communities and workshops
more emphasis on helping land ideas in client
organisations – making them stick
but not about researcher SOLELY as enabler –
needs to be able to pull out insights and tell the
crucial stories too

13. consumers people
observation immersion
respondents partners
messages relationships
campaigns story
one size niche tailored
channels experiences
silos collaboration
monolithic adaptive

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