I’ve been Co creating for a few years now (and doing client/ respondent workshops forever!) Below are my top tips on how to Co create successfully….

Just in case you are not familiar with Co creation (or in case you don’t share my views on what Co creation is), before we get to the top tips, here’s my take on what Co creation is…

Clients & consumers getting together to develop new ideas for a brand. Usual methods are: on-line bulletin boards, websites & apps (to record behaviour, collect materials and for spontaneous ideas) and workshops (often to brainstorm and develop new ideas).

Here are the top tips:

1. Engage client participants – they can’t just turn up for Co creation

Co creation is about brand stakeholders coming together to develop ideas for a brand. That means clients participating together with customers.

However, in my experience the appetite for the idea of Co creation can be stronger than willingness to actively do the work. The agency running the sessions therefore needs to engage client participants right from the off:

• get client participants excited about the process and the potential outcomes – sell the sizzle
• make sure that client participants know and have signed up to all the work they are going to need to put in – brief them properly to get their active engagement
• but also make the client participants’ life as easy as possible by minimising the work they have to do (so for example, if part of the client’s task is to monitor respondent’s posts about their experience with the brand, the agency should summarise the best bits so that clients pushed for time can get a quick recap of what’s going on)

2. Equally, engage ‘respondent’ participants

Really get them ‘up’ for the tasks ahead by…

• Letting them know they will be working directly with clients on creating something new and exciting for the brand
• incentivising all the tasks you are going to get them to do with prizes; recognition; and lots of appreciation
• spend time with respondent participants on the phone;on-line – any way you can to make sure that they are on board with the project – I would always pay for a project manager to keep tabs on respondent participants (and potentially client participants too)

3. In Co creation workshops think carefully about how you are going to ‘gel’ the client and respondent participants so they work as a real team

• mingling warm-ups where you have to ‘find someone who’ always work well
• pairing off clients and respondents to create ‘a buddy’ system works well and returning to the buddy throughout the workshop is great too

4. Co creation can easily default into ‘customer closeness’ unless you find ways to get clients and consumers to workshop together. Some ideas:

• Firstly, what I’ve found doesn’t work: presenting pre-prepared ideas to a group of respondent participants – often you end up getting a ‘flat’ focus group with respondents ‘responding’ and clients ‘observing’
• So instead, get clients and respondents to either develop ideas together (small groups of 4) or improve ideas together (groups of 2-4)
• I’m a big fan of capturing the ideas developed using ipads and an app called notability so that no insight is lost

5. Outputs from Co creation can easily fade away after the sparks of the workshop. Here are some tips for how to get the most out of what you put in

• right after the Co creation workshop session build in time a for a client participant thought capture session
• spend time polishing up and presenting the ideas that were roughly sketched in the workshop session (in other words apply lots of post analysis time to the Co creation outputs, listen back to all that capture data on your ipads/ notability app)
• review and glean insight from all the other data collected in the Co creation programme (on-line diaries/ uploads and other homework sessions) and deliver this as a meaningful ‘story’ to clients
• involve a designer in helping you to deliver beautiful looking concepts so that ideas can shine at their best
• re-present these findings to the Co creators – clients and respondent participants alike – for their feedback
• and (ideally) test out new thinking with qual groups or via other research methods

Good luck with Co creating!

If you’d like to chat to Kath more about Co creation please feel free to call on 07738 180529