How can customer co-creation improve product development?

Co-creation offers a way to have a consumer voice along your development process. With consumer check-ins from concept to early prototypes to refining final product, their input can help you move quicker, be more focused, and in the end designed to meet their desires. Sometimes this will take you in a new direction, sometimes it’s understanding what attribute is most valued, sometimes it uncovers a new pain point.

Customer co-creation is a collaborative approach in which customers are involved in the product development process. Businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers' needs, preferences, and expectations by involving them in the development process. This can result in the development of products that better meet the needs of customers and are more likely to succeed. Businesses can improve the quality and design of their products while also reducing the time and resources required to develop new products by co-creating products with customers.

The way I love to innovate is through co-creation workshops with customers! This is where we pull in cross functional teams from the customer, bring also outside perspective into the workshop to enrich it further. We can refine the innovation challenge / opportunity, we can run insights make connections to higher themes / opportunity platforms, we can ideate in bigger bolder ways then engineer the top 3-5 ideas impactful to feed into the innovation pipeline. Co-creation brings people out of their comfort zone, it positively challenges their creativity and secures ownership / buy-in of innovation ideas from the beginning.

This is a valuable lesson from my experience: we often confidently believe that whatever we create will strongly appeal to customers. However, the reality can be unexpectedly different. Addressing specific pain points is certainly innovative, but true success comes when these solutions align with the needs of the customers we aim to serve. This alignment facilitates a smoother journey in meeting customer expectations from the scratch. The key is to showcase your idea or an initial demo of your product to your customers early on. Continuously gather their feedback, rather than waiting to present a fully developed product at the final stage.

Depending on industry and situation, customer co-creation can be an invaluable aid in ensuring that your innovations are of meaning, relevance, and value to your customers. By working with customers, you can ensure that they understand your innovations, they can see how they can apply in their environment, and they see benefit to themselves from them.

Some of the benefits of having a co-creation process with a client are: *Add value to the brand *Generate higher levels of customer satisfaction *Increase customer loyalty rate *Develop more efficient and effective products/services *Increase the competitive advantage of the organization that puts this strategy into practice *Bring the customer closer to the brand *Make internal processes more assertive *Make safer and more efficient investments But, to be able to obtain all these advantages, the value co-creation process must be a highly immersive experience for the customer.

Customer co-creation for CPG brands can help with demand planning and optimize marketing spend. Bringing customers into the new product development process can help shape not only the product features, but also the marketing copy. Simply ask customers what problems they have, and use the same language to describe your product’s benefits. Use the principle of reciprocity to activate your customers to help spread the word about a new product launch they helped co-create. There is a great platform that can help you called TYB (www.TYB.xyz)

First benefit is stakeholder alignment. For any innovation project, different stakeholders have different KPI's so co-creation helps us align on common set of KPI's. Second benefit is to leverage everyone's background, knowledge, capabilities in a diverse way along with bringing their creativity into the project. Everyone has something unique to contribute to an innovation project, it just does not happen in other ways. Third, co-creation brings people together, encourages teamwork. Facilitator can challenge the teams in a way you cannot, because they are external and have no constraints. You also need someone running the innovation process smoothly, and this is critical to success.

When you involve customers in your innovation you are working backwards from them, instead of imposing your ideas on them. This means that what you produce will be aligned with what the customer is looking for instead of something you think they need. Pull usually works better than push.

Primary advantages of customer co-creation are reduction of risk for you and the customer, earlier buy-in to your solution (because the customer was part of the process), and stronger trust in you and your company. If there is a disadvantage to customer co-creation, it's when the customer's trust in your competitor may be higher than in you ... which could lead to the customer using your insights to drive the solution to a competitor. Generally, however, this concern isn't as widespread as you might think, because ethical customers recognize and appreciate the risk you're taking.

This depends on customer's objective. This is why I even run co-creation, my Identify module to zone into customer's real challenge or opportunity. We use tools to extract this so the innovation project can anchor around something that is the most meaningful to the customer. Co-creation needs to bring focus, energy and fun into the innovation process. It is proven people are most creative when they are having fun. Co-creation sessions need to be done in an external space where you take the customer out of comfort zone. New environment challenges people to think if new, different ways, which is the basis of successful co-creation.

Consumer expertise is best used for a deeper understanding of the problem, to react to ideas or prototypes and to optimize ui/ux. Leverage consumer co-creation to get better at solving consumer problems and to deliver the best consumer experience. The biggest challenge with consumers creation is that it is often used in innovation to brainstorm ideas. Consumers are experts on their lives and their struggles. You are the one with the expertise to know how to solve for it at scale. If you find your team is not very good at coming up with strong ideas, then that is a problem. But not one you should delegate to consumers as they do not have as much understanding of technology or Commercialization.

Keeping the focus and energy are the most challenging part of running co-creation sessions. As a facilitator, you need to make sure the team is focused on the goal at all times. You need to make sure they are energized, so lots of coffee but also lots of energizers, breaks to secure this. Process control is the most challenging part!! You need to make sure customer comes out of the innovation tunnel :)

O facilitador desta iniciativa precisa se atentar na clareza e alinhamento do desafio para o publico que vai trabalhar na solução e a adaptação da linguagem pode ser muito importante. O cliente entende das suas necessidades, mas se não for bem conduzido com metodologias apropriadas para a esse processo de criação, ele pode acabar desviando do assunto principal ou deixando de olhar para a real necessidade e acabar focando em ideias que não tem um potencial tão grande de entrega de valor e retorno.

Clear objective to start with. Success criteria how to score the ideas at the end to make sure they can bring impact into the business. Keeping a close eye on the ideas during rapid prototyping and testing phase. Preparing for the launch with the customer. Tracking the launch and rating performance after. Ultimately this is the real proof co-creation works!!

1. You need to go in with very clear hypothesis and an understanding of what metrics resolve them. 2. You should know by now that self-reported scores on adoption or purchase are not predictive. Instead measuring emotions like excitement, ease of use, negative affect if it was taken away are often more likely to be predictive. 3. You need to work with your insights team regarding what methodology best works. You want your test to tap into predictive emotions in the early stages of development and on behavioral metrics when you have a prototype.

It depends on the industry and the product. Customer may sometime be bias and may lead the product development in the wrong direction. Furthermore, the customer may also be unaware of the regulatory, market, vision of the company and feasibility which may lead to the downfall. Customer feedback however in my opinion is a well justified tool, but strong customer interference in product development may not have a positive impact.

Success stories of the co-creation process: *AB-Inbev with Co-op Food (insertion of an AB-Inbev employee within the Co-op Food logistics sector to avoid products running out of stock) *Natura with Cocriando Natura (digital platform so that customers can contribute to the development of the brand) *LEGO with LEGO Ideas (platform where anyone can showcase new ideas for the company's products) *Coca-Cola with Coca-Cola Open Up (digital platform for consumers to contribute with ideas and social solutions, with cash prizes for the three most innovative ideas) *Fiat developing the "car of the future" through its customers