I’m at a conference put on by Corante [Disclosure: I may be on their board of advisors. In any case, I occasionally blog at Corante and some Corantists are friends of mine.] and the Center on Global Brand Leadership called 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, at Colubmia U. (Unfortunately, I missed the keynote by Russ Klein, CMO of Burger King.)

David Sutherland of the Launch Institute does a discussion-opener about “co-creation.” He defines co-creation as “when value is jointly created through an interaction of the firm and its customers,” i.e., “dialogue.” He says companies discover there are three “platforms” for innovation: 1. Insight: Sensing opportunities. 2. Creation: Bringing insights together. 3. Value Capture: Implementation. “Every company that has an innovation process has these three platforms…” At each of those points, you can involve “consumers” and suppliers in a co-creation process.

Co-creation ranges from the latent (e.g., ethnography) to the explicit. e.g., Whirlpool does a lot of ethnography. They videotaped the process people go through in the wash process. They had assumed that cycle time was important, but they found the wash cycle sometimes took days. And they found that people doing lots of laundry often had lots of kids and thus didn’t want the washer/dryer so removed that they have to leave their kids. So, they’re going to introduce socially-acceptable washer/dryers for living areas.

BMW turned sides of buildings into video screens and allowed people to put their own messages onto them. BMW calls this “show to know,” i.e., showing things “in order to understand the people interacting with the brand.”

JetBlue has a “storybooth” where customers get to tell a story about JB. (NPR is suing JetBlue over this, apparently, See Rm116.

Paccar co-creates with suppliers.

David uses Foo camp as an example of co-creation, which feels like a stretch to me.

Then we break into discussion groups…

We had an interesting discussion, focusing more on innovation and co-creation than on marketing. Apparently, the idea for Kraft’s 100-calorie packs of snacks came from customers. And Lego brought together some of the top Legomaniacs. Also Hyatt came up with it’s “stay fit” program by listening to customers, although theidea for the program did not come from a customer; rather it was a response to the customer needs the customers expressed.

We come back to a whole-group discussion, but I’m taking good enough notes on it. One random point: Does co-creation work? How would we know? BMW has run ads boasting that their cars are designed by designers, not by customers. Under what circumstances does it make sense? [Tags: clay_shirky jaron_lanier]

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