3 - Four Hats

By Kate Dowler

Should you involve consumers in the creative process? What’s the best way of doing it? Thinking about the different roles, or ‘hats’ you want consumers to wear can help you get more meaningful and useful input.

Over the years, I’ve had many discussions and debates about the role of consumers in the creative process. Consumer co-creation is all the rage, but what’s the best way to do it? Are consumers really able to come up with compelling new ideas?  Or do they hinder creativity by rejecting ideas which are too radical, or designed for a future world that is not yet understood?

From years of experimenting with different approaches and formats, I believe the most important consideration is to think carefully about the role you want the consumer to play, and what value this will bring. Choosing the wrong role, or not considering roles can completely jeopardise the process.

We consider four distinct consumer roles when designing creative sessions: Four Hats (not to be confused with another useful set of hats - Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats – although there are some parallels!)

Hat 1: Consumer as Subject

Sometimes, particularly when you are at the start of the creative journey, the consumer is primarily there to inspire new thinking and ideas. The focus here is on observing real behaviour and understanding needs and attitudes. The consumer’s role is simply to be themselves. Incorporating elements of observational insight or learning through discussion allows rapid and iterative translation of insight directly into ideas.

Hat 2: Consumer as Reflector

Creative consumer sessions, and indeed workshops in general, often don’t allow participants time to reflect and think. This is especially important for consumers, who may have come into the session “cold”, or may need some time to process early ideas or imagine the future world for which these ideas are intended. Incorporating elements of individual reflection within the session allows consumers to think beyond their initial response, reflect on the dimensions of each idea that could be improved and then respond when they are ready.

Hat 3: Consumer as Builder

One of the biggest things that can go wrong is on relying on, or expecting consumers to come up with compelling new ideas. However, there is a big role for consumers to play in building and developing early ideas together with the creative team. In this role, the consumer needs to have an open mindset – free to challenge but ultimately to see their role as helping the creative team to get to better ideas, not to sit there and judge.

Hat 4: Consumer as Judge

This role is massively over-used when seeking consumer feedback, and the source of many bad decisions regarding which early ideas to progress. Early ideas are just that – early, and a work in progress. They need work and development to make them stronger. They are often hard to understand, or may be rejected by consumers for being too radical in today’s world (or simply because they don’t like the colour!)

Unless instructed otherwise, the default consumer response when presented with an idea for feedback is to judge – to accept or reject. When in fact what we really want to do is to discuss, learn about and build the ideas. Sure, if there are barriers and challenges, we need to understand them, but the decision about what to progress shouldn’t purely be based on consumer judgement at this stage.

The judge role should be used sparingly, and typically when ideas are better developed (concept testing), and not too early in the process.

Which Hat?

Choosing the right hat (or hats) is the key to involving consumers in the creative process, remembering that consumers can change hats as the process and ideas evolve. Indeed, in some of our longer and more involved projects, it’s not uncommon for consumers to wear all four hats at some point in the process, typically in the order described (Subject – Reflector – Builder – Judge).

As well as getting much richer, and multi-faceted insight, it’s also much more fun and engaging for participants to play different roles. The energy and sense of achievement at the end of a well-executed session is great to experience, and provides momentum for the project and ideas to progress further.

What’s your experience of involving consumers in the creative process? Do you recognise these roles from your work? We’d love to hear your thoughts.