Co-creation

There's been a lot of talk and a lot written about co-creation, but this article in Sunday's New York Times is one of the better attempts to talk about what is driving this trend and the pros and cons associated with it.

One of the interesting points it makes is that many of the entrants making films - in this case for the Firefox Flicks promotion - are aspiring directors or art students making it as much about co-promotion as it is about co-creation.

Personally, I still feel in most cases getting people to create ads in some kind of contest is a modern day promotion and a little lazy for the brand (the Mastercard 'fill in the blank' priceless spots being a prime example).  The best forms of co-creation are when a brand can create something people want to pass around, adapt, play with, share and talk about.  To me, this is co-creation while the former is not co-creation but one-sided consumer creation.

Comments

[James Cherkoff]

Agreed. Finding the right spot on the brand control spectrum is the hard part of this new environment. If you hold too tight no one else can play with the toys...but if you give too much away people can be left facing a scary blank sheet.

[Mak]

More agreement from me. To build on what you are saying, a big part of co-creation happens when consumers hijack the brand because they fall in love with what it stands for and offers. They appropriate it for their own use, changing the brand meaning and identity in an organic way.

[Mark]

More agreement from me. To build on what you are saying, a big part of co-creation happens when consumers hijack the brand because they fall in love with what it stands for and offers. They appropriate it for their own use, changing the brand meaning and identity in an organic way.

[GrahamHill]

To reverse-quote David Ogilvy, "Perception is not reality".

In the mind of most marketers, brands are something created by their (agency's) hard labours. But in the real world, brands are created in the mind of customers as emotions, feelings and memories of use. Marketers' perception is often not customers' reality.

Marketers rarely go out and talk face-to-face with customers to find out what the brand in use looks like. So all the co-creation, all the adaptation of products for new uses, all the mash-ups with other products, all the discussion between customers, the "real brand" in other words, goes unobserved by marketers.

The best forms of co-creation are not when an artificial brand can create something people want to pass around, adapt, play with, share and talk about, but when marketers listen to what customers have always been telling them about the real brand and use that as the foundation for a dialogue with customers.

Real marketers are conversationalists.

[Gareth]

Graham

Interesting comment but I have to disagree for two reasons.
First, I worry about the notion of 'what customers have always been telling them about the brand.' People can't tell you why they do things or what they want to do - they're not equipped to and there's lots of barriers that get in the way - Why? by james Tilly is a great book that discusses this.
Second, I think we have fallen in to the trap of fusing together stimuli ( product, service, communications) and response (brand). Maybe I wasn't being clear but I was trying to talk about the co-creation of communications.