Corporate Profile 47Billion Information Technology
Co-Creating Brands & Campaigns via Customer Communities
1. Tom De Ruyck
Head of Research Communities
Anouk Willems
Senior Research Innovator
CO-CREATING
BRANDS & CAMPAIGNS
Webinar 27.11.2012
How consumer communities help you to understand your target
group & to identify actions to strengthen your brand
2. 1. WHAT BRANDS ARE
2. CO-CREATING BRANDS & CAMPAIGNS
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER
KNOW YOUR BRAND
IDENTIFY ACTIONS, TOGETHER
3. GET THE MOST OUT OF COLLABORATION
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
3. A brand is a person’s gut feeling about
a product, service or organization. It’s
the emotional perception of a brand that
makes people want to built relationships
with the brand (Conversation Manager, 2011).
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
4. Competition is more aggressive than ever.
Consumers need to make decisions based
on their gut feeling. Branding and the
emotional connection consumers make with
the brand can make thé difference.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
5. Loyalty is less flexible than before. As
a business it’s crucial to challenge the
status quo more than ever before.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
6. Consumers are passionate about brands and
want to built a relationship. They like to talk
about them, want to talk to brands and do
things with & for the brand.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
7. All successful brands have something
in common: a consistent ‘story’. A story
that is credible, and the reason why
consumers want to built a relationship
with their brand.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
8. A good ‘story’ is one that makes
consumers want to identify with the
brand.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
10. …How consumers perceive your brand & product category?
…How do they identify with the brand?
…What are actions to take to strengthen this position?
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
11. By collaborating with consumers, you can get
to know the target consumers, how they
perceive your brand and co-create
actions, together! Time is important: 1/time
to explore and understand everything about
the brand, category and 2/ time to connect
with the consumer, the trends, the social and
cultural context.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
12. Your consumers are probably the best
consultants you can hire.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
13. An MROC defined by Forrester
Research (2008):
[Captive interactive groups of people online
joined together by a common
interest, which are systematically
harvested for qualitative market research
purposes.]
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
14. #
Number Profile Objectives Duration
We work with 50-150 people that are interested
& interesting. The duration of the community is
flexible from 3 weeks to months &
ongoing, depending on the objectives.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
15. Before we setup the collaboration, we
define the desired end-goal. Based on
the current situation (AS IS), we
compare it to the desired end goal (TO
BE), and define and try to close the
gaps.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
16. COLLABORATION APPROACH:
3 STEPS TO CO-CREATE
BRANDS & CAMPAIGNS
1/ Know your customer & category
2/ Know your brand
3/ Co-create actions for brand &
communications
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
17. 1/ KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER & CATEGORY
The first phase is all about getting to know the customer and
how they experience your category. What are their passions,
their routines and how they experience your products &
substitutes. This phase is not only the fundament of the
study, but is actually ongoing. You will never stop learning
who your customer really is…
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
18. EXPLORE YOUR
CONSUMER’S EMPATHY MAP
Thinking
What is important for them?
What are hopes, dreams and fears?
Seeing Hearing
What does their What & who influences
environment look like? them?
CONSUMER
Pains Gains
What are their What do they truly want?
frustrations? What How to measure impact?
are key obstacles? What gives them
passion?
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
21. 2/ THE BRAND UNIVERSE
The second phase is about understanding the
brand through the eyes of the consumers.
Key objectives are: How do consumers
experience the brand? How do consumers
evaluate the brand compared to it’s
competitors? How do they evaluate previous
campaigns & activations?
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
22. EXPLORE THE BRAND ELEMENTS
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
25. 3/ CO-CREATE ACTIONS
Based on the knowledge about the
consumer and how they experience
the category and perceive the
brand, we identify actions to bring
both closer together.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
26. EVALUATE BRAND ACTIVATIONS
5 key questions to evaluate campaigns
1. Is the message simple?
2. Is the message credible?
3. Is the message relevant?
4. Is the message relevant for me now?
5. What’s the bigger goal behind the brand?
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
30. 3. Getting the most out of your collaboration
Unite different stakeholders. This collaboration
enables for an iterative process with short feedback
loops.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
32. 3. Getting the most out of your collaboration
Collaborating with consumers creates impact
internally, but can also create impact externally.
Communicating about the collaboration can result
in positive brand effects and product effects.
Webinar:
@tomderuyck Co-creating Brands &
@anoukw1 Campaigns
34. Tom De Ruyck
Head of Research Communities
Tom@insites-consulting.com
linkedin.com/in/tomderuyck
Anouk Willems
@tomderuyck Innovator
Senior Research
Anouk@insites-consulting.com
tom@insites-consulting.com
www.insites-consulting.com
Editor's Notes
Online communities facilitate the collaboration with consumers to discover the brand positioning and which actions the brand needs to take to strengthen the brand. Besides exploring the brand image, communities also allow for co-creation of campaigns by evaluating raw communication materials in an iterative process with key stakeholders
Add source!Definition of a brand: emotional perception makes people want to built the relationship with the brand. A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization,Brand = emotion Brand is not the product, the logo or the identity book.
Waarom is gut feeling belangrijk? Mensenmoetensnelbeslissingenmaken. Overload of options, choice stressNeed to decide on products based on gut feeling (combi ratio/emo). They choose the brand they have best gut feeling about, and emotional connection. Consumers need to make choices between so many different brandsCompetitive landscape is more aggressive than ever (most offerings have similar quality and features, we buy based on trust)Branding offers the difference charismatic brand: brand for which consumers think there is no substitute “one of a kind” for product, service or organization
Consumers are not that forgiving anymore. Loyalty is under pressure: the Paradox of brands Message: On the other hand, people are not loyal to brands anymore (statistic?): the paradox challenge!This shows how important brand engagement is these days
B&J voorbeeld: Passie & praten over, met en dingendoen met merken (=advertisement maken, of voorpositining van zichzelf). Fans (facebook), part of the community, use brand for positiningShow passion for brand by sharing these photo’s
CredibilityAuthenticity Story behind it
Identify with the story Brand story is bigger than products. Good product is the basis to built the brand upon. Without a product there is no brandBrand perception grows when consumer experiences different elements of the brandHigher Brand identification results in more positive brand conversations and better perception of the brand
Het is de hefboomvooreenmerkGoedeperceptie, conversaties = meerkopen, promoten en zienze het alsideaal, best brand
Important questions to ask yourself: How to increase the identification with the brand? How to consumers perceive my brand and what are actions to take to strengthen this positionWhat do they talk about
Merk, product cat. En acties >> tijd en ruimteDoelgroeplerenkennen >> gaatniet in 2u trends, sociaal, category >> over tijdwillenvolgenSlide volgende: Zo relevant mogelijk; Acties >> waaromniet co-creeeren, consumentenwillendit (8/10). Zedoen het ookgoed (meerrelevanteacties)
Before we explain what a research community is and what we mean with structural collaboration, let’s first explain a bit why it’s so valuable to collaborate with your customers. It is simple; we think that your customers are probably the most effective consultants you can hire. Why? 3 reasons; Your customers have a lot of knowledge about your brand. They have known your brand for their whole lives. And if you compare that to the brand managers; they are likely to switch jobs every 2 years. So, consumers are more loyal. Secondly, it’s about passion. To illustrate this, I’ll give you an example with a community we did for Ben & Jerry’s from Unilever. The members of this community were brand fans and very engaged with the brand. And thirdly, your customers are always right; they are the ones that always buy your brand and are responsible for generating sales. They don’t have an internal agenda or are involved in organizational politics. So, that’s why your customer is a key influencer in your processes which you need to involve in everything you do.
We involve these customers with the brand by means of setting up online research communities. What is such a community? The first definition of an MROC (in full: marketing research online community) was formulated by Forrester Research. It’s basically an online, closed platform, where you invite a larger group of participants for a longer period of time for qualitative research purposes. If you compare this to classic qual research, the 3 biggest differences are: - 1. that it’s closed; the platform is only accessible to the specific profiles you’ve recruited, so your secrets are safe- 2. second, a research community is setup with a larger group compared to a focus group; this results in idea clashes and richer discussions over time. - 3. third, in a research community you’re connected over a longer period. This leads to consecutive learning over time because you can built upon previous learnings and have a real connection with consumers. In addition, this flexible way of working also offers the opportunity to engage more internal stakeholders and colleagues with the community.
So, now we know what a research community means….what makes a great research community? We identify 4 key ingredients;1. The profile of the participants: we work with people that are interested and interesting. This means that we only invite people that are engaged with either the brand of the community or the topic of the community. This makes them interesting for us and our clients because they have something to say. 2. We usually invite between 50 and 150 people for a community. This is based on research we did for the ‘optimal threads’ or discussions. We found out that when a thread generates 30 posts or reactions from members, we see a saturation occurring of on topic arguments. After that, all arguments are likely to already have been said, and we see an increase in off topic posts. We calculated that we need between 50-150 people to generate this 30 posts per thread. And, not by accident, this is the same amount as researcher Robert Dunbar has found when he was doing research on the maximum amount of social connections people can maintain. They also call this: the number of Dunbar. 3. In terms of objectives, we can setup a community for different purposes, ranging from an early stage of funnel ‘insighting’ to concept development, brand development, to the actual launch of the product or campaign and final phase ‘optimizing’ of the product, brand or campaign. 4. Based on the objectives, and type of questions you want to ask the community, we can setup a community for 3 weeks/months/ or even ongoing. Let’s take a closer look at these ongoing communities.
Based on previous community experiences with branding and campaign objectives, we’ve developed an approach for co-creating brands&campaigns with consumers.There are 3 steps1. Know your customer and how they use & experience your category: 2. Know your brand and how your customer experiences your brand3. based on the previous two steps, you can compare both and identify actions together with your consumers that strengthen the brand and bring them closer to the consumers.
The first step of the collaboration is to really get to know your customerWho are they, what do they like, what other products/services do they use. And also important, how they define and experience your category. What are their product routines and so on. This first phase is the fundament of the whole collaboration. Every community that we do here at insites, starts with a focus on the consumer. It’s also a phase that is actually ongoing, because there are always new things to learn about your consumer with evolving trends and you’ll never stop learning about your consumers.
This first phase results in a good understanding of who your consumers are and how they perceive your category. One way to report back to your colleagues, is by using a consumer empathy map. This includes 1/their passions, hopes, fears and dreamsSecond, Their social environment, who and what influences themThird, what they see (the trends and the cultural context)Finally, the pains and the gains cover the category and product experience.
How to involve internal stakeholders in getting to know the consumers? And how to bring the consumer to life within the company?Well, one of the techniques that we use for this specific solution on brand and campaign development communities, is what we did for Flair.Flair is a women’s magazine. In belgium, they saw their number of readers dropping, The editors felt they lost touch with them. So, they wanted to re-connect with their readers to re-position their brand. In order to re-connect them with their readers, we invited all of them to fill out the profile of their typical reader. So, both editors and the consumers of the community. After, we compared the answers of the editors with those of the consumers in the community and it was very interesting to see how different both groups perceived the brand During the internal workshop at Flair, we reported back on the gaps to define the actions to strengthen the brand.
Another example I want to show you is from Philips. And this shows exactly why this first step of getting to know your customer is that important for successful branding and campaignsAs you may know, Philips, has product lines for sleep treatment. The company identified China as a potential new market for their sleeping solutions. Before entering this market, Philips had an interest in understanding the sleeping behavior of Chinese consumers and their drivers and barriers towards those solutions. There were a couple of challenges we faced in this project though such as budget and time restrictions as well as the fact that Philips executives wanted to be able to actively follow the online discussions. Therefore the online research community had to be run in English while the fear existed we would lose out in terms of the fine nuances in Chinese culture and society.To avoid this caveat, we used 10 of our participants as our co-researchers in a process of crowd interpretation. After our analyses of the community outtakes these participants would be presented our findings and asked to challenge them. In performing the task of crowd interpretation these participants were asked to explain our findings from the Chinese cultural perspective, illustrate our findings with their own personal examples as well as go beyond our first impressions. This process created truly unique insights which we as researchers and marketers would never have uncovered from an online distance.As a concrete example, our first analysis indicated that Chinese consumers told us sleeping was about for their psychological and physiological well-being, such as feeling upbeat, smiling and happiness. But the crowd interpretation taught us there was also a higher motivational element behind it. More importantly for Chinese people sleeping well allows one being able to work harder in order to be successful. Professional success ultimately brings material wealth and in the end status. Success and ambition are major drivers in the lives of the Chinese (as in many societies), but it’s not appropriate for them to communicate about this openly from their own personal perspective. Learning about this insight was important for Philips e.g. in developing the ideal communication message for sleeping solutions. The co-researchers really helped us to truly understand the Chinese consumers, to make sure the brand would be positioning in the best way.
After we explored who the consumer is and how they perceive the category. Next we want to learn how they perceive the brand. Key questions are: How do consumers experience the brand? How do consumers evaluate the brand compared to it’s competitors? How do they evaluate previous campaigns & activations?
The exploration of the brand universe results in a good understanding of how consumers see your brand. One model we often use for this phase is the CRUSH model, from the book “how cool brands stay hot”. This includes the most important factors of successful brands Next to identfication, 4 other factors have a positive influence on the brand:1. cool: this does not refer to rebellion, or resistance. It refers to attractive, appealing brands that are popular in their immerdiate social circle and bring a sense of novelty and surprise. 2. real: refer to authenticity and staying true to your roots and heritage3. unique refer to the originality of the brand compared to competition. 4. Happiness refers to brands being able to trigger positive emotions or relieving stress or other negative emotions.
The next example shows how the result of this brand exploration can look like?A community that we ran for B&J was all about branding and campaign development. Based on the brand universe we made for Ben & Jerry’s, we made a brand fan DNA for future briefings of advertising agenciesSo, anyone that needs to know about branding and activation for b&J, will receive this DNA that was co-created together with the brand fans.
You can even take it one step further. For Danio, from Danone, we also did a brand &campaign development community. Like for B&J we developed a DNA together with the brand fans of Danio. We shared this with the advertising agencies during their development process of the next campaignHowever, we took it one step further. The consumers we’re the ones to tell them what their brand stands for, but also choose the agency with the best campaign concept.So we actually used the community to let the agencies pitch to one another.
Ok, based on the first step (getting to know the customer) and step 2 (understanding the brand universe), we come to the third step of this collaboration. During this phase, we compare the learnings from phase 1 and 2 with the desired end goal of the client. So, in the third phase, we will identify right actions to strengthen the brand.
This third phase results an exploration of the right actions for your brand. One model we often use to come to these actions and evaluate previous brand activations is based on the principle of the book Likeonimics.They refer to it as the TRUST model, which includes asking the key questions to the consumer about messages from the brandTo start with: is it simple and understandableIs it credible, do I believe what they are sayingIs it relevant for me? And is it relevant for me, right now? Finally, and a very important dimension: can I identify with the bigger goal that’s behind the brand?
These evaluations of the brand messages can result in the positioning for your next campaignFor example, we ran a community for Vodafone about the development of a new music service appThe community helped us in doing a 360 degrees testing, to improve the appAnd, they helped us formulating the proposition for the go-to-market campaign in how to convey the right message. That is one example how community members help you in the collaboration: determine a relevant message for future campaigns.
Another example about developing brand activations, is from a collaboration with an advertising agency. This agency is called Famous, and is a Belgian advertising agency. They run a community that help them to make their messages and campaigns for their clients more consumer relevant. A few month ago, the community helped them to co-create the campaign for a famous wiskey brand: William Lawsons.
The members were asked to review their initial ideas. However, they weren't to happy about the result. The campaign was too far stretched and was not liked anymore. So, the campaign was postponed and adapted based on the feedbackIt’s still the same idea, but with a different execution. The community really helped to finetune the company to the end-result.We can’t show you the end-result in this webinar format, but if you go he link, you can have a look yourself.
Now, We’ve discussed the 3 steps on how to setup a collaboration with consumers to co-create brands and campaigns together. This brings me to the last part of this presentation: getting the most out of you collaborationThere are two tips that I want to give you; the first one is that collaboration offers the great opportunity to unite teams across departments or organizations. This enables you to setup an iterative process with all the key stakeholders. This ultimately leads to a more impactful project.Let me give you an example of this.
We setup a community for Ebay, for their Dutch online auction website called marktplaats. Very famous here in the Netherlands, one of the biggest websites. This community was executed to improve a communication campaign aiming to increase the acceptance of selling NEW products on Marktplaats (instead of second-handed only).we gained insight into triggers and barriers of users and non-users to buy second-handed and/or new products on Marktplaats. Based on these insights the advertising agency created communication messages which were directly fine-tuned and tested again on the community.This collaboration with both the company and the advertising agency enabled for an iterative process that lasted for 3 intensive weeks. Involving the advertising agency directly, made that we were able to re-focus instantly. The new communciation approach was then optimized with the help of the community members. The final communication campaign was almost 1 on 1 derived from the research community.
So, the previous example show you the opporunities of collaboration with key stakeholders.Another tip I want to give you to get the most out of your collaboration, is to leverage it. It can create impact in the internal organization…but also in the external world!This leads to positive brand effects (e.g. it shows that the brand is listening to its user). Next to that, it can also lead to product effects (e.g. it shows the product is co-created with other consumers, making it more relevant)
Let me give you an example of this. Next to the previous community of Ebay, we re-activated it and expanded the collaboration to a bigger consumer group. Now, the goal of this community was to co-create the new website. This was a very strategic project, which involved many people from different departments (IT, communication, marketing, management)we set up a 3 month community with 140 users to explore the user experience, users needs and the communication campaign.This collaboration was used for their communication campaign as well. The renewed website was communicated through a national press release, referring to the preceding community phase to fully align with users' needs. The updated website as recently been launched and is now accessible to all users. So, communicating about the process and the result of the collaboration are great ways to leverage your collaboration to the xternal world.
