Co-creation is about bringing together people who have the most at stake in a relationship and working corroboratively to find answers and innovate breakthroughs. For brands, co-creation involves both internal and external stakeholders, including customers.
In this convo, I speak with Nicholas Ind, coauthor of the recently published Brand Together: How Co-Creation Generates Innovation And Re-Energizes Brands. Ind, partner at Equilibrium Consulting and associate professor at the Oslo School of Management, used a co-creation community of consumers, brands and others to develop the book.
For marketers and brand managers, co-creation can drive business growth and enhance brand reputation. Social media has made co-creation a more understandable process for businesses, but co-creation goes well beyond social channels.
Among the many actionable topics Ind and I touch upon are:
- The disconnect that often occurs between your perception of how your customers feel about your brand and what they really feel
- Market research can be an abstraction of what's going on, with co-creation offering marketers the opportunity to get face-to-face with reality
- The roles of naturally occurring brand communities versus the co-creation communities a brand develops
- The need for an organization to have the humility to listen and admit that it does not know everything about itself
- Where the introvert fits into the co-creation spectrum
This convo is sponsored by:
Vitrue, an original Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, is the leading social marketing platform facilitating relationships between brands and their fans across multiple social networks via its software-as-a-service solutions. Social marketers and agencies world-wide use Vitrue's Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform and its Publisher, Tabs, Shop and Analytics products.
Brandwatch is one of the world's leading social media monitoring and analysis tools, with offices in the UK, US, Germany and Brazil. Global brands and agencies use our tool to cut through the noise on the social web and find the conversation that matters, empowering decisions that improve their business.
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Neil Glassman is principal marketing strategist at WhizBangPowWow, where he delivers integrated social, digital and linear media solutions. Join his conversations on Twitter and Google +.