Dub has recently completed a great project with one of the UK’s leading brand innovation agency clients, on behalf of a major own label ready meal producer.

Objectives
To explore consumer attitudes towards different ready meal cuisine types offered by one of the UK’s leading supermarkets. The purpose of this online research community was to evaluate perceptions of several newer cuisines that had recently been introduced within the stores, understand how they impacted on more established cuisine offerings, and to identify any further opportunities/gaps.

Results
The extended nature of the online research community approach meant that we were able to dedicate discussion streams to fully explore consumer responses to a wide range of issues, and to respond/react to comments and insights.

A potential new range opportunity that only emerged in the final couple of days of the online research community is now being actively pursued by our client and is likely to lead to significant incremental business with a major retailer.

For more information contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or by emailing stephen@dubishere.com

Courtesy of our client, we’ve got another great case study to share with you. This time the study was for a salad dressing manufacturer and brand owner, to help them understand current consumer attitudes and dynamics within the sector.

Approach
The study was undertaken over a two week period in the summer of 2010 to coincide with the peak usage of salad dressings, thus enabling ‘real-time’ experiences to be conveyed. The ongoing nature of the online research community enabled continued probing and interrogation of consumer responses, as well as the introduction of positioning stimulus that helped our agency client to identify the most credible and appealing proposition for our client’s brand.

Client comment
“This simply would not have been achievable within the more limited time constraints of a more traditional research methodology (ie; focus group discussions)“, say no more!

For more information or to understand how your brand or organisation can benefit from online research communities, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

Added Value – part of the WPP marketing services group of companies – is the world’s leading brand development and marketing insight company with some 25 offices worldwide and a global client list that spans all categories.

 Dub have been working with Added Value for over three years, developing and enhancing a leading-edge digital insight and innovation tool that helps them to source the latest ideas, insights and opinions from consumers and experts around the world, without the need to bring together contributors – an activity that can prove costly and inefficient.  By both providing the social software and helping the client with some of the finer points of building and managing online communities, Dub has helped Added Value win more pitches, delivered more creative multimedia insight, and cemented its positioning as one of the leading industry innovators.

The platform, designed to support Added Value’s work – known as AV-id – makes use of micro-blogging, IM, forums, bulletin boards and media-sharing technologies, and harnesses the latest social networking behaviours to support live and ongoing dialogue among leading-edge consumers and experts from around the world. Added Value consultants are empowered with a unique moderation toolkit that allows them to interact directly with the community whilst sharing their thoughts and ideas with other members of the project team in both local and remote offices.

Driving actionable insight

By assigning members of the niche online communities structured tasks and activities, (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature), a stream of rich, multimedia insight and consciousness flows. Data visualisation tools such as tag clouds help strategists identify trending topics and emergent themes, and subsequently used to spot issues that require further investigation and probing.

Idea generation and collaboration innovation

Recognising that traditional research techniques can sometime be a one-way street, we worked with Added Value to develop a number of collaborative tasks and techniques that allow members of the communities to generate and share ideas, and then select winning ideas. This co-creation technique is widely accepted as a new paradigm that brands are quickly latching on to as they seek to enhance their innovation  capabilities.

Usability, training and adoption

Today,  many of us use social software in our own private lives, but relatively few are adopting them in the workplace to enhance productivity and, as in this case, support greater insight and connectedness.  Knowing this, we worked in partnership with Added Value on a rigorous education and adoption program for key Added Value stakeholders, including a regular series of global webinars and inspiration sessions. These sessions also provide the opportunity for valuable debate that feeds into the platform’s ongoing development program.

The AV-id platform and  methodologies it supports are being deployed around the world everyday by Added Value, and in languages including Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and Italian.

As well as being used to engage consumers and experts, AV-id is equally at home engaging internal stakeholders – marketers, R&D teams, designers etc – and creating internal innovation communities.

For Bel – a global food company – AVid was deployed to help marketers, R&D professionals and designers come together to create new ideas and innovative solutions to everyday problems they face.

To-date, brands including Pepsi Lipton International, Meetic, Tefal, Reliant Energy, and Barilla among others have embraced the AV-id approach.

We’ve recently had an international, multi-brand organisation benefit from using our web-based tools to gather ideas from their internal expert communities. It was a great project since a) the platform was deployed in a foreign language, and b) it allowed staff from all levels and various departments to come together to share their ideas. In effect, the brands were cross-fertilised and the resultant ideas were then opened out further for exploration, research and development by the relevant expert communities. Ideas were created and co-created by individuals and groups, thus providing a greater array and some more quirky, interesting thoughts.

This process of using staff to innovate collaboratively is fast becoming the norm thanks to the emergence of social media. What is especially interesting is that collaborative innovation provides a voice for all within the organisation, no matter what level they are. Young or old, Junior or Senior, Receptionist or Director – an idea can come from anyone, anywhere at any time.

Relative to this concept of providing your staff with a voice, and listening to them, Sainsbury’s – the UK’s oldest supermarket – has turned to it’s staff for help during these tough times. Justin King, CEO, needed fresh ideas to keep the supermarket ahead of it’s rivals. In a new Channel 4 program currently airing, King opened up the (shop) floor for ideas from his staff and gave a select few the opportunity to bring their ideas to life, to see if they could really make a difference.

In the first episode that I watched, a new employee of Sainsbury’s with a background in sales took to the floor and carried our face-to-face, or direct, sales. It was a hit, though it was clear that the personnel carrying out the sales had to be carefully selected. The lucky lady who came up with the idea and led the way is now in-charge of implementing the initiative across a number of stores as a further trial. Brilliant, bravo!

Organisations need to innovate during these tough economic times, and beyond. Collaborative innovation, and the identification of new leaders to bring it to life, is a strategy that should always be considered, given the right tools and support. Here at Dub we help our clients generate and manage ideas, spot the best talent and drive innovation using our proprietary technology and added value service. For more information, contact Stephen Cribbett