Everything we do starts with insights – speaking to our target audience to understand challenges and opportunities that our brands can support.
For many, direct contact with the target audience stops there. If we’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on who you ask), we might have the chance for market research, asking for feedback at the eleventh hour and half hoping nothing changes.
None of this is co-creation.
Co-creation means working with our target audience at every stage – from insights to strategy, creative through to execution. To build something distinct, resonating and true to their experience.
In health advertising, I passionately pursue co-creation because I know that I am not the target audience; I may even hope to never be the target audience. Health is personal, it’s raw, it’s a world that many don’t understand until they’re unwillingly living in it.
Research and insights are like riding a tour bus through this world, taking snapshots of what’s going on but never staying for long enough to understand the realities of daily life. We keep moving, speeding towards the creative brief and many deliverables.
Co-creation means getting off the bus. We take the time to settle into the community, getting to know the individuals behind the ‘insights’. Immersed and integrated beyond project milestones, we’re there to understand and to build mutual trust and respect. In health, this is a privilege that I don’t take for granted.
When working to build a brand for a new women’s mental health service in Victoria, the privilege of co-creating with lived experience was central to every step of development. Giving space to people’s stories, listening to their past struggles and fears surrounding support services, sharing in their hope for this new one. Their ideas helped to create something formidable – a brand that empowered women to be at the centre of their recovery journey, no longer side-lined in their own care. The power of co-creation built a service that women feel safe to engage with, at last.
So why do so few of us get off the bus? There’s extra hours, extra planning and yes, it can be easy to get lost navigating the crowds… but the outcome – something powerfully right.
Thank you again to the 131 women and those who identify as women, who participated in the co-creation of Wren.