The Origins of Co-creation

The Origins of Co-creation

In many recent speeches I’ve been asked to talk about the origins of Co-creation. While the ideas of co-creation have been around for awhile, think Lego’s Lego Factory (also, check out my interview with Jake McKee, formerly of Lego, in Spark), things have really started to accelerate, lately.

I’ve been inspired the last week or so to see Jennifer Rice revisit the wonderful dialogue we had on Corante’s Brandshift over a year ago. Her posts have made me take stock of co-creation, where it’s been and where it’s going.

In the spring of 2004 I was in the middle of writing Beyond the Brand and struggled with developing a meaning for co-creation. Originally, the purpose of the book was to de-bunk the $1.2 billion focus group business and offer an alternative. While writing, I realized that there was something much bigger going on at the fringes of the way companies and customers were interacting.

In this search, I took a great deal of inspiration from the alternative sports market that includes skateboarding and snowboarding. Here, everyone actively participates in a chaotic dance of co-creation between manufacturers, consumers, pro-athletes and retailers. After this exploration, I got so turned on by the concept that I wanted the title of the book to be, “How to Co-Create from the Bottom-Up.” Alas, my publisher didn’t get it and won’t go for it. I described the disconnect that many companies have with their customers in a section a called The End of Branding As We Know It:

“Branding has been appropriated as a distorted form of communication in which the company always assumes the position of power and is not necessarily required to either listen or respond to feedback.

People are expected to sit quietly and listen; many react to this by tuning out much of what is said. They are developing a Brand Immune System: the reality is that people will only pay attention to your brand or your product when they actually need or want your product or service – not before, and usually not after.

Most companies have failed to stay engaged in the ever-evolving lives of their customers, making it impossible for them to notice the subtleties of the two-way conversation (if they’re allowing it in the first place). When they stop paying attention, customers will also disconnect from the relationship. But maintaining this relationship can be both profitable and potentially more defensible in today’s competitive marketplace.

 

This dysfunctional dynamic between companies and their customers often leads to companies that spend much of their time, energy, and money using top-down tools to aggressively promote their existing brands or products, rather than finding out what is relevant to their customers from the bottom-up. Likewise, many companies outsource their most important relationship – the one with their customers – giving outsiders full control to attempt to understand their customers by using traditional top-down tools in their often static and tightly controlled conversations.”

In an effort to add to the dialogue, I also shared with the readers of Brandshift some of my thoughts from Chapter 4 of Beyond the Brand:

“Many companies focus their strategic thinking around current market needs by getting into a conference room and divining the future (or attempting to). It’s a very inside-out or top-down approach. In a reversal of this traditional process, exceptional companies use an outside-in approach, or bottom-up strategy, to focus their thinking on engaging in a dialogue with the other members of their community, allowing them to co-create innovations with their customers. This holistic, organic strategy allows companies to continually recontextualize and reframe their brand, making necessary adjustments as the community and customers evolve.

A bottom-up strategy of co-creation takes the open source philosophy a step further. First, it’s about loosening the control over the strategic process and focusing on guiding it instead of owning it. It’s about inviting the right customers, suppliers, and employees to participate in an open, informed process based on solid guiding principles. To do this well, companies must focus their strategic energies on building consensus and communities. The strategy has to be human. The focus has to be on the quality of the input into the strategy and the communications of those ideas to the community. Companies must focus on being evolutionary.

Disruptive innovation fueled by bottom-up (co-creative) learning means companies must participate in an open way within their community. This requires true corporate transparency, in everything from marketing to manufacturing, and a more long-term, sustainable outlook of the community in which they participate.

Companies that are able to make the transition to providing honest, original, culturally relevant materials and products will win. People will carefully weed out and broadcast to their peers those companies and brands that they do not trust. Many companies have discovered that being deeply connected to their community is good for their brands. In this new era, brands will have to become good, creative citizens of the community in order to survive.”

Two years later, these words still seem to ring true. I still believe that in this new era, it is the creative citizens of a community — people and companies — that will thrive by co-creating marketing and product innovation.

In the next few days I’ll be writing a few posts on Co-creation, looking forward at some of the amazing things that people are doing in this evolving world.

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[john kerry]

At Keen Branding, it's all about identity. Specifically, Keen Identity Creation™, Keen Identity Design™ and Keen Identity Management™ services that we use to help companies build strong brands, both existing and new.