Esomar The "Co-Creation Revolution" Unilever
A paper written by Ana C.M. Medeiros and Andrew Needham about the Co-creation revolution. It is no secret that the past 20 years have seen a major decline – some would say the slow death – of corporate and brand innovation, but the debate about why, and what needs to be done about it, is very much alive. Some, such as Doug Hall, speaking at the Marketing Society’s Innovation Masterclass at the end of last year, argue that consumers have much to answer for, and he doesn’t seem to be alone. In an interview with the UK’s Research magazine, Drayton Bird argued that he doesn’t want market research to tell him what people think because ‘people don’t bloody well know what they think themselves’. This is a stance, he reminds us, taken by ad agency Leo Burnett, who said ‘The public does not know what it wants’. The argument was repeated at Marketing Week’s Innovation Summit2 a few weeks ago, when a number of brand owners quoted Henry Ford’s remark ‘If I’d asked the public they would have said they wanted a faster horse’. The rise of ‘open source’ software has shown how global communities of skilled and intelligent consumers collaborate to find better solutions and are prepared to reveal and share their innovations to achieve their goal. In an article last year in the Financial Times he said ‘the rise of user-driven innovation is about the democratisation of innovation – an act of economic empowerment. Boosting economic empowerment is a powerful way of boosting growth’. Considering that for most retail and FMCG companies 80% of innovation is incremental, surely businesses should be opening their doors to consumers and embracing their ideas as part of the innovation process.
