What if if you could track how your product is used by consumers, from your desktop?

Now you can!

During the last couple of years Syncrowd have worked with Top40 Food companies in Scandinavia.

Almost every every time the client has made a project and involved Syncrowd we have done the qualitative research and created a framework for either Product development, Packaging optimization og Trade marketing.

With a new online service called ThinkVisual, Syncrowd will enable clients to track how their products is used and what to improve, visually, and direct from their desktop.

Try ThinkVisual at: http://syncrowd.com/Clients/Welcome.aspx

 

Syncrowd wins award for Best IT-upcoming 2012

CEO Johan Thorsted and IT Engineer Dennis Francek receive the award.

Yesterday the 9th of May we joined the IT-award show in Silkeborg. Among 2 other candidates we were nominated best IT-upcoming and luckily we were announced the winner and received a beautiful trophy, which we proudly can look at every day here at the office. 

Entrepreneur and jury member Martin Thorborg reasoned the decision with Syncrowd’s ability to use existing technologies such as crowd-sourcing, smartphone software and image collection and combine it with a credible and understandable business model that Syncrowd have had the courage to realize at the right time. The manager director of Syncrowd, Johan Thorsted says afterwards, that Syncrowd is very pleased about the reward and the increased focus on the product and solutions that Syncrowd offers. 

We are all very excited about the reward and every time we look at the trophy it gives us the energy and motivation to bring Syncrowd to the next level.

Key Insight on alternative sales channels presented by Johan Thorsted

How do the consumers think alternative food channels and what defines the adoption of new channels? These were the key insight topics that were presented by Johan Thorsted in a Seminar at the Agriculture & Food organisation today. Due to our continuously consumer research in 24 markets around the world and a passion for connecting our insight to real-life solution Syncrowd assist business developers from the FMCG industry in redefining market conventions and creating sustainable new sales channels.

Syncrowd at Food Health Conference 2011

Managing Director of Syncrowd, Johan Thorsted, was one of the speakers at the Food Health Conference 2011 where food companies from all over Scandinavia were listening to experienced people within the areas of Innovation and Marketing.

Together with Innovation Guru Paul Sloane Johan Thorsted was delivering real life insight about how to work with Open Innovation in large size enterprizes.Through case studies with some of the Scandinavian Top 10 Food companies Johan Thorsted showed how to transform innovation succes rates through new perspectives on consumer Insight and Innovation Execution.

People tend to have difficulty explaining exactly why they like a product or experience, yet Voice of the Customer (VoC) is most B2B companies' method of choice for driving customer input.
But just try to answer these questions: What does your favorite brand mean to you? Why did you purchase the last gift you bought for someone else? Can you describe your ideal customer experience?

Questions like those make my head spin, because my behaviors, opinions, and decisions are driven as much by emotion as they are by logic.

Businesses that measure customer input solely via surveys and focus groups run the risk of deriving insights that miss the real drivers of customer behavior. My future actions with a company may be unintentionally different from what I can verbalize. When's the last time you bought a candy bar because "you needed a pick-me-up," when you really just had a craving for chocolate?

Fortunately, uncovering customer insights has evolved in amazing ways. Robert Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has developed an innovative technique for unearthing the hidden drivers of customer behavior. The ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) asks customers to capture images that illustrate their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a brand, product, or experience. Conversations with the customers then reveal what's behind those images, which lead to some really interesting insights.

Here's an example. A ZMET participant described the image that for her illustrated the brand of a large university in the Midwest the following way: "A red barn stands alone in the middle of a field. It's weathered, and the paint is chipping, but the foundation of the barn is structurally strong. The barn performs its duty without complaint, and the man who owns the barn takes great care of the functionality it provides. The barn also has a basketball hoop, but unlike the paint job, the hoop has a brand new net."

Those images drove a set of qualities— reliability, good work ethic, honesty, loyalty, strength, tradition, pride, and toughness—that helped define the brand experience for the university.

Syncrowd at ANUGA 2011 Food and Beverage Fair in Köln

Syncrowd joined more than 150,000 visitors at this year’s Anuga food fair to get a taste of the future for the food and beverage industry. And we must say that the future is tasty.

The global financial situation drives developers and innovators to be more creative than ever, and for less money than ever. 1,000s of new healthier, more convenient and of course tastier products were displayed. Drinkable ice-cream, cone-shaped pizzas, food perfume and 100% organic packaging shaped as anything between a fish and an apple were just some of the products we visited at Anuga. There is no lack of new ideas in the product development departments, but nevertheless as we talked with the companies we understood that they need direction for their innovation. New ideas are cheap, but to get the right idea at the right time means that is has to be founded in a fundamental understanding of the life of the end-users, which makes it costly and time-consuming with traditional research methods.

It didn’t take long before it was confirmed that Syncrowd products are just what the companies are looking for these days. Cheap, fast, and deep consumer insight, that gets researchers and marketers from knowledge to result. Delivering one-of-the-kind products for the food and beverage industry was a major advantage for Syncrowd and it was easy to create buzz around our research methods. We are still working on getting in touch with all contacts we made at Anuga and are thrilled about beginning to serve companies from Canada, Bolivia, Thailand, USA, Nigeria, Argentina and many more.

Syncrowd at Interpack Conference in Düsseldorf

A look into the future

Some 2,700 exhibitors from 60 countries recently took part in interpack in Düsseldorf, the world’s most important trade fair for the packaging sector and related industries. Under the motto "Quality of Life", the Innovationparc Packaging at the exhibition creatively formed a kind of shopping mall with five different shopping areas, each devoted to exploring and showcasing one of the following themes: Meaning, Health, Identity, Simplicity and Aesthetics.

Meaning is the major component of quality in life because the sense of meaningful actions gives our life direction. The realisation that resources are not limitless moves sustainable economics and consumption to the very heart of society’s debate on meaning.
Health is at the top of the list of life’s priorities and is the major component of quality of life. It is no longer considered a given fact but something that can be actively influenced. As a consequence consumers will ask for products that proactively contribute to their health and well-being.
Identity explored how certain lifestyles can be represented by packaging and design, bringing a feeling of comfortability and belonging into an increasingly global and complex world.
Simplicity is the pursuit for happiness and simplicity with a focus on the essentials, constantly trying to reduce complexity in life. In terms of packaging this means true convenience throughout the value chain.
Aesthetics contributes to the quality of life by enriching everyday life with beauty and design. As such this is a trend that will gain more importance across the consumer industries, and it will eventually permeate the whole process of buying as well.