After managing to track down the leading protagonists, I found a substantial archive of material that charted the evolution of the Roboshow: starting with the early ‘Vidzine’ music video/video art magazine produced by Patrick D. Martin and Doobie Eylath in 1982; culminating in ‘TV Fetish’, shown on BBC2 and later toured as a multi-screen show.

I’d originally joined this innovative group of techno-determinists when they were building the mobile Techno-cab prototype and “Q” the interactive robot to raise funds and test an immersive visual music experience. £750,000 was subsequently raised in 1986 mostly from fashion impresario Peter Bertlesen, and so I then joined Robodevco Ltd which was formed to develop the Roboshow, a system using spacial sound and multi-screen vision to fully immerse the audience.

Sadly, only a test pilot was ever produced despite the rave reviews from the press that I’d had a helping hand in getting. Spin-offs did emerge, however, as technologies and ideas developed and were used in the arts, music and commercial arenas followed, including: collaborations with the likes of Nam June Paik, Jim Whiting, Paul McCartney, The Cure; and installations at the Atlanta Olympics, London Planetarium, Millennium Dome, Seville Expo, V&A and nightclubs/cinemas around the world.

Given my interest and research into Collaborative Innovation it seemed fitting that the submission to the Rewire Conference should be a collective effort by a group of the original Roboshow participants. Our submission has now been accepted and we hope to encompass ideas of robotics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, mind, technology; and the relationships of multimedia art to industry, technology and investment both then and now. We’re also looking forward to exploring the most relevant themes with the conference organisers as well as the most compelling presentation format/s.

Our latest article for Admap presents new research that illuminates how businesses can activate any kind of product recommendation through direct-to-consumer engagement programmes, and, most surprisingly, how non-loyal customers beat loyal ones hands down in the recommendation stakes.

The edited article appears in Admap’s April 2011 edition. Read the unedited article here. [160k PDF file]

There seems to have been a somewhat surprising boost in advertising expenditure lately, at least in certain sections of the media, particularly given the general acceptance by major brands that much advertising no longer works:

‘We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive. We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.’ (Trevor Edwards, global brand and category management VP, Nike)

‘The traditional marketing model we all grew up with is obsolete.’ (Jim Stengel, former-GMO P&G)

Is the unexpected increase in traditional ad spend a case of old habits dying hard, or a matter of expediency given client confusion surrounding the variety of non-traditional marketing alternatives touted by all and sundry? Perhaps it’s just a case of risk aversion in these difficult economic times, mixed with the belief in safety in numbers — numbers meaning both the old reach model of ‘proving success’ and the number of people deciding that the most established marketing techniques are the least risky.

But how robust are the underlying assumptions about why a particular marketing approach is more valuable or a safer bet for your business than any other?

Background

Joining forces with Dr. Alain Samson from the London School of Economics and Political Science, we stepped back from business as usual to examine what the underlying assumptions might be behind marketers embracing — in some cases wholeheartedly — a particular marketing technique or approach. Over the course of two reports and a study from 2008 to 2010, we’ve discovered that the latest and greatest marketing silver bullets rarely stand up to much critical scrutiny.

The first investigation looked beyond the inter-research consultancy spat about whether or not the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was the holy grail of marketing metrics. After interviewing more than 50 major brands in the U.K. about if and how they used the NPS, we soon found out that it was just one number (of many) that was useful to know, which eventually is how it has been more realistically repositioned by those who had originally claimed that it was the ‘one number you need to grow’.

The same is true when we examined the industry critique of what Dr. Duncan Watts (of Columbia University and Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!) calls the influencer hypothesis. Obviously, Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point helped propel the idea that the connected few consumers could influence the many. However, as Watts points out, much of the theory surrounding the power of influencers has relied on anecdotal evidence and post-rationalisation of a biased selection of events.

This hasn’t stopped social media marketers making great claims about online influencers as they map a model from traditional media PR onto the web. This is not too surprising; much of what is taken as common wisdom in social media spheres is nothing more than a vortex of self-affirming opinion fuelled by the ‘groupthink’ of commentators commenting on commentary — as we found out during a study we conducted for the Nesta Innovation Fund in the U.K. into collaborative innovation.

Whenever we’ve scratched the surface in our specialist area of connected marketing approaches, such as those noted above, we’ve quickly found that many marketers accept what they read or hear on the industry grapevine without much question, assuming that others have assessed its validity, then they continue this mob mentality by embracing new techniques and passing anecdotal information on as received ‘wisdom’. Surely this is a dangerous process on which to base your marketing, and therefore to large extent your business, success.

This is as true of traditional marketing as it is of alternative approaches and techniques such as the influencer theory. Marketers tend to only crow about their successes. They try to bury their mistakes, from which there’s usually a lot more to be learned. So the marketing industry has been built for the most part on looking at one side of the coin.

Latest marketing belief in question

Our most recent research exercise, about customer loyalty and the spread of word of mouth, practices what we preach, examining our own marketing activities. It also supports the idea that accepted wisdom in marketing as whole is in need of greater examination.

The premise of the research once again calls into question a common marketing belief — this time that your most loyal customers are your greatest allies when it comes to converting other people into customers.

In the pursuit of market share, engaging your loyal customers in word of mouth (Wom) marketing campaigns to recommend products to their peers on a more trusted, personal level than you can achieve as a marketer seems like a no-brainer. It’s generally accepted that greater levels of consumer involvement and product usage lead to higher levels of recommendation, fullstop. However, it turns out that not all consumers are equal in that scenario.

Samson analysed secondary data from our company Yooster.com, covering three years of Wom marketing and research campaigns with our independent Australian consumer panel for major brands, including Nestle and Nivea. The campaigns invite members of the Yooster panel to try product samples, influence some aspect of the product, feed back their product experience, and share their views and experience with relevant people they know.

Samson’s analysis discovered that it’s actually non-loyal customers — people who have been using a rival product more often — who will serve you best, generating approximately 10 per cent higher interest in purchasing your product among other people, as well as a greater absolute number of converts than loyal customers.

One likely reason for this unexpected clout from non-loyal customers is that, while loyal customers may generally be more motivated to talk about a brand, non-loyal ones may have a contact network that is less saturated with people who already use that brand, so there’s more room for conversion. This means that even people who have never used a trialled product before can be better than loyal customers at generating effective Wom. In addition, non-loyal customers who use multiple brands’ products within a specific category are also more experienced in that category and as a result may be more credible to their contacts. Finally, if non-loyal customers are ex-users wooed back as a result of a privileged product trial, they may also have a heightened sense of goodwill for your brand and therefore a motivation to be evangelistic.

The surprise revelation that non-loyal customers are the key drivers of product recommendations has a knock-on effect about other marketing activities that are being wholeheartedly adopted. For example, it causes serious pause for thought about the trend for businesses to develop communities of loyal customers. These communities appear to restrict positive Wom and goodwill within themselves, rather than spreading it far and wide. They may, possibly, be useful for retention purposes (but only if you can justify the cost of engagement, particularly when every marketer in the land is actively encouraging disloyalty by wooing rivals’ customers). However, they are less likely to provide a successful way of acquiring new customers or clawing back ex-customers.

The analysis also throws up other questions about accepted marketing beliefs and practices that are worth examining in the future.

Conclusion

Far too much content in the marketing press is simply case studies about successful campaigns from major brands, and chatter about new ‘must-do’ marketing techniques, perpetuating accepted ‘wisdom’ with little in the way of informed, robust, evidential analysis.

If major brands really do believe, as they say, that ‘much advertising no longer works’, in this day and age of (supposedly) open communications and consumer-driven businesses, everyone should be rigorously examining and debating the other side of the marketing coin: what doesn’t work and why, what’s not as it seems, what can be refined and how, and what to try instead.

Sharing what may still be regarded as confidential corporate information that helps provide a competitive edge may be a problem, as well as not wanting to admit failures for fear of damaging the brand. But isn’t that the point of learning — finding out what does and doesn’t work, then pointing out the best path from your experience to others? (And wouldn’t a closer alignment with robust academic insight of what we do and how it works help move the marketing industry closer towards becoming a valid profession? But that’s another story.)

It may take a sea change for major brands to be comfortable airing their dirty linen with their clean, but a slight adjustment in course is a good start, and that adjustment is with their innovation activity.

Brands always need to innovate, however the innovation process should include not only the research and development of new products and services, but also the way brands carry out their marketing.

Part of the marketing innovation process should look harder and deeper at what brands already do traditionally and why, as much as at which new techniques and approaches should be embraced and why. If you invest a greater percentage of your innovation budget on actually testing and refining your marketing process, rather than simply accepting the status quo or blindly following the mob from campaign-to-campaign, I think you’ll be very surprised by the outcome and its implications for your business.

Justin Kirby is DMC’s founder and CEO at Yooster.

Dr. Samson’s paper Product usage and firm-generated word of mouth: some results from FMCG product trials is available online to subscribers of the International Journal of Market Research.

Put simply, many hands can make  light work! But it’s worth bearing in mind that even James Surowiecki of Wisdom of Crowds fame clearly sets out the conditions in which he believes his theory applies. Surowiecki’s book title even alludes to the flipside of his theory, as explained way back in 1841 by Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. So put another way too many cooks spoil the broth and ZDNET commentator Dennis Howlett attempts to point out why in his Enterprise 2.0: what a crock piece from 2009:

“Communities are driven by passionate community evangelists. They don’t have an allegiance to the company or brand but to the idea of community. There’s nothing wrong with that but what happens when they move on or become tired of batting their head against a brick wall?’’

Perhaps this is why Penguin Books failed with their A Million Penquins collaborative effort to write a novel on a wiki platform, or at least as far as what we understand a novel to be now. The project also supports the 90-9-1 rule, which I’ll look at as part of the another post. But the failure might have more to do with a heavily promoted corporate sponsored project (B2C) being more susceptible to vandalism than a more open and collaborative one like the Linux kernel development process (C2C). However, even in the open development arena the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design has been understood for some time, as outlined in Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay from 1997.

Interestingly, the literature review Dr Alain Samson at the LSE carried out as part of our research into collaborative innovation for NESTA suggests that successful radical innovation is more likely to occur in B2B collaborations where there’s innovation expertise across a range of business sectors.  Consumers on the other hand are seemingly best involved in initiatives looking for more incremental or continuous innovation:

“B2C organisations typically have to evolve existing brands; where incremental innovation is less risky when it comes to retaining consumer loyalty; the potential dangers to existing brand share can make some B2C companies riskaverse.”

Some thought that this might not be because the quality of the original ideas are likely to be any better/worse in B2B versus B2C but because the collaboration partners have more resource and infrastructure to make them happen.

There were those that disagreed, but they tended to cite C2C (e.g. open source) rather than B2C collaboration examples:

“Napster, Dyson, Linux all come to mind”

“I think collaboration is a social phenomenon and there are likely to be as many if not more breakthroughs in a consumer environment.”

“Consumers are not constrained to business models or corporate ethos. They are driven by passion and online collaboration is a passion based
game.”

“Listening to customers … one consults to frame innovation, not to engender it.”

Others thought that the Times They Are a-Changin:

“Historically has been the case … What is happening nowadays is that consumers find a use and leverage which is unexpected. Look at how consumers have used the internet … And I think the consumer will be making major changes, doing these major innovations over time. It may be that once the tools are in people’s hands that we are going to have a higher percentage of this from consumers and communities than we’ve ever had before.”

Maybe the key to any radical collaborative innovation that involves consumers might not be B2C, but for companies to leverage B2(C2C) innovation, whereby consumers frame and solve their own problems.

It’s also important for businesses to understand what barriers might prevent them from engaging in collaborative innovation with consumers and I plan to look at these next.

Many large organisations claim to have excellent and world-class capabilities in:

- Business processes
- Collaborative software (video conferencing, blogs, wikis etc.)
- Developmental support (workshops, training, coaching, learning etc.)

What appears to be missing from the client perspective is a methodology, system or tool (e.g. Kaplan Norton ‘Balanced Score Card’, Six Sigma, etc.) to help optimise collaboration, working relationships and productivity, particularly if a new
project is starting or a new initiative is under way.

So while the three areas mentioned earlier are very well understood by the majority of large organisations, a means or method to ‘scale’ collaboration and help enhance productivity in a systematic fashion is potentially a missing piece of the jigsaw.

By providing a systematic methodology and framework for decision making, research participant Bruce Lewin of 4 Groups has suggested that their 4G technology helps optimise the often ‘hard to manage’ or intangible elements of collaboration, namely working relationships, shared values and creative tensions that are part and parcel of any collaborative activity.

Bruce proposed a possible experiment/intervention. The context being that from a commercial and organisational perspective, collaboration is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, people intuitively acknowledge its value and significance, often citing ‘team work’, ‘engagement’ and open source and internet-based examples such as Linux or Wikipedia as success stories. On the other hand, there are no widely recognised processes or methodologies for collaboration which can be easily ‘managed’ or systematically applied to an organisation’s problems and its stakeholders. For the most part strong, replicable collaboration appears to most as an ethereal and intangible process and the main reason for this is that collaboration is dependent on the notoriously fickle and complex area of human interaction and dynamics.

A possible solution is 4 Group’s 4G tool, designed to systematically predict and optimise key components of collaboration, namely relationships, behaviours and culture. Having defined a number of ‘ideal’ relationship and cultural configurations, along with being able to predict relationship and cultural outcomes given different combinations of people, 4G creates a framework to enhance decision making and choices when looking to actively manage and enhance effective collaboration.

I caught up with Bruce recently and 4 Groups are currently carrying out some research into Emergent Leadership with Prof. Vlatka Hlupic at Westminster University. They’ve also been following-up their own research into the how 20-40% of performance is determined by people’s relationship (see The Hidden 20 – 40% on Slideshare). Hope to hear more from Bruce soon.

I’d been particularly intrigued by a video David had shot a couple of years ago at an event where Cliff Prior of Unltd, and Nick Temple of the School for Social Entrepreneurs had led people in a workshop to map the territory of social enterprise. It was both entertaining and instructive, as you can see.

It struck me that a similar exercise would be useful as far as mapping the Big Society space is concerned, especially as far as where it intersects with civil society, social enterprise, etc. So I mentioned this to David and coincidently he’d just been to a meeting about h0w to explain the Big Society and was already sketching a map of the territory on his iPad. You can see the sketch and subsequent cleaned up version on his mapping the big society post where he’s made a first stab at trying to help clarify a lot of different terminologies around for the different sorts of social activity, current or hoped for. Hopefully, this will prompt the likes of Cliff Prior and Nick Temple to run another mapping workshop that aims to help explain the Big Society to a wider audience in an engaging way. Hope I get an invite too.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed… As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies

Their Markets of Conversations slogan was subsequently revised to include Relationships and Transactions, but although they described what they considered to be the new reality for businesses in the digital age the manifesto was not a prescription as far as how businesses should join the conversation. Some believe that the answers is for businesses to use social media technologies as means of having a two way dialogue with their consumers, although as the agency Zeus Jones point out:

Apple is proof that transparency is that transparency and two way dialogue are not essential for “social success”

They argue that social media marketing, as carried out by the mainstream, is still based on the AIDA model (“a relic from mass communication”), i.e. consumer Action is result of Awareness creating Interest and Desire. Instead they suggest that social media technologies should be used to provide actual services that have not been designed simply to generate conversations. Alternatively, brands could create products that people actually want to talk about!

Arnstein’s model has been critcised for being linear and this criticism is equally valid as far as Li and Bernoff’s version because people may participate more or less depending on the context and this may change over time. Despite Li/Bernoff’s mixing of metaphors about people and processes, and the linearity of their model, it’s considered by some to be a useful framework for developing social media strategies. It does, however, appear to begs as many questions about enterprise action as it answers, including: what, where, when, why, who with and how much you should spend compared to more traditional communications approaches. It also doesn’t appear to answer what is perhaps the most important question facing brands and that’s whether it’s better not to engage at all than to do it badly!

The ‘Outside In’ versus ‘Inside Out’ debate may be one of those horses for courses decisionmaking scenarios, largely dependent on cultural attitudes towards incubating new ideas. We hope to explore this theme, particularly as far as those more collaborative examples.

If everyone is thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking!

Our point being that there’s a danger of getting caught up in a vortex of self-affirming opinion when developing a framework for evaluating collaborative projects that lead to innovation. So the research exercise sought to introduce new voices and re-introduce some old ones, bringing different perspectives to the table, particularly regarding the use and value of collaborative innovation within the business arena.

The pilot research included a literature review and an open survey developed by Dr Alain Samson at the LSE to: engage new voices and different perspectives; provide NESTA’s Connect arm with a benchmark for where opinions converge and diverge; reveal interesting new lines of enquiry.

Our pilot research appeared to support the findings from the initial thin-slice scoping work that the area of collaborative innovation is somewhat underdeveloped and scattered, lacking consensus on “proven” strategies, enablers/barriers, management implications, and most importantly empirical frameworks for the assessment of collaborative innovation effect:

I just can confirm that all research w/r to analyzing the impact of Open Innovation (OI) methods on companies is very much demanded. There is, however, not a single construct to measure what OI is. To develop this thus would be the first task. Also, I doubt that many companies are already having a “practice” of OI, most are just piloting with some methods. Hence it will be difficult to conduct really an empirical study (if you not do it as previous researchers just claiming traditional R&D networks as “open innovation”).

Professor Frank Piller, RWTH Aachen University/MIT

I think you are right to say that there is a lack of good data on collaborative innovation. There are isolated examples that keep coming back – Eric von Hippel’s work on user-led innovation, the technology-based examples from Hank Chesbrough’s book, perhaps some of corporate venture capital-based stories – but little in the way of systematic evidence.

Professor Julian Birkinshaw, London Business School/MLAB

We presented a case for the funding of some more systematic hypothesis testing, or at least the setting up of some collaborative intervention that looks into how more supporting data could be generated or encouraged. It struck us that perhaps the first place to start would be to carry out a more thorough literature review that goes beyond our initial thin-slice. At the same time, this would have helped to determine the viability of the most comprehensive hypothesis testing research recommendation we received as part of the pilot, as well as highlight any major gaps.

I recently caught up with Professors Piller and Birkinshaw to see if and how things might have changed since carrying out our research.  Professor Birkinshaw didn’t have anything to add as collaborative innovation is no longer his focus. However, Professor Piller mentioned that although he’s putting a paper together on how Open Innovation has been systematically applied in a couple of cases in Germany, and sees the piloting of these approaches at individual firm there, he thinks that in general there’s not enough coordinated action on a larger scale. So he supports our assumption that the research we suggested would be very helpful. Sadly, this seems unlikely now given all the cuts being announced. We will, nonetheless, revisit others that we spoke to see how and if they think things have moved since we spoke to them last year.