How Loyal Fans Can be Co-Creators for Your Business

adidas Made For London (AM4LDN) hit the streets of the British capital earlier this month; the first in a series of individually designed and manufactured shoes tailored to a city and optimised for its athletes.

In March 2017, the adidas London Newsroom and Key City team collaborated with the Global Future team and Running BU to deliver a co-creation session designed to capture insights and ideation from a select group of specially chosen London influencers and Creators. Each attendee was selected based on their connection to the brand, their affinity for creation and design, as well as their passion for sport – in this case, running.

In simple terms, our plan was to create an experience that educated the Creators on how the design and production process works. Education is sometimes perceived as a boring word, but for me, this gave the Creators some genuine and unique insights into areas of the brand they would never typically be able to access and reinforced the key messages of the SPEEDFACTORY project – speed, innovation and co-creation.

The game plan for the day was to provide structure to the session to ensure we covered all of the creative design discussions and the product testing elements but to not make the schedule too rigid and restrictive. We didn’t want to create a classroom, we wanted this to feel like a workshop where the Creators can be playful and experiment alongside expert advice and input from our product designers.

Across two days the workshop session removed those traditional barriers around product development, ideation and design as areas typically developed behind closed doors and instead opened up the whole creative process to our Creators.

From design and styling through to test simulations with prototype footwear, it was a truly immersive experience and very much brought to life the SPEEDFACTORY philosophy of always testing and constantly evolving based on insight.

Knowledge sharing was very much a two-way dialogue, allowing our Creators to truly influence a process that would ultimately deliver a product to market that they had co-created.

In many ways this session represented the future of the sports industry; breaking down the barriers that exist between brands and their consumers by embracing the insight and knowledge that our Creators have and instead viewing them as a potential resource rather than something to be kept on the outside. Many of the guys we involved shared an affinity for adidas that rivalled most of us who have worked for the brand for years! That passion was a true virtue and a great opportunity in a crowded marketplace where every brand aims to command the loyalty of that same Creator audience.

Overall this project reinforced the realisation that when we are brave enough to bring our Creators into the brand and allow them to create, we actually unlock ideas that we could perhaps never have achieved on our own.