From ‘Customer is King’ to ‘Customer as Collaborator’

With the explosive growth of digital health, there’s never been a better time for health care brands to innovate with new products, services and partnerships. To cut through the noise and ensure you’re making the right investments, however, your organization must expand its mindset beyond “customer is king” to “customer as collaborator.”

This is where co-creation comes in.  Co-creation is the purposeful collaboration between brands and customers to develop products, services and solutions.

Most organizations have mechanisms in place to take a pulse on customer feedback, including surveys, panels, crowdsourcing and member town halls. So is customer co-creation a combination of these methods? Not exactly. 

Traditional research and crowdsourcing often involve point-in-time or sporadic data collection and one-sided, superficial engagement. Co-creation, on the other hand, aims to build an ecosystem for ideation, feedback and collaboration. Instead of a once-a-month panel, picture a community of engaged customers with whom you work from ideation all the way through post-launch. 

While the process of co-creation is linear—after all, the intent is to get to the finish line with what you’re developing—it creates a community where customers keep coming back to connect with your brand, and with each other.

Often, those same customers will take their love for your brand beyond the co-creation space and into their personal networks, amplifying your brand through word-of-mouth. All said and done, everybody wins.