Co-creation research: Fundamental for designing more valuable experiences.

Whether you're crafting innovative products and services, enhancing loyalty programs, or fixing gaps in your customer journey, our co-creation strategy ensures customer experiences are not just valuable but truly time well spent.

Scroll below for our co-creation process, articles, case studies, and client testimonials.

Co-creation research is designed to learn more and eliminate group bias. 

Co-creation research is essential for informed experience design because it actively involves clients and end-users in the creative process, ensuring that the final product or service truly meets your needs and expectations. By engaging stakeholders and end users early on, co-creation uncovers valuable insights, fosters innovation, and builds a sense of ownership, leading to more relevant and user-centric solutions. This collaborative approach not only reduces the risk of costly redesigns that can occur with traditional focus groups but also enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by delivering experiences that resonate deeply with the target audience.

Our Co-creation Articles and Case Studies

  • There is a substantial shift in health “ownership” happening in the healthcare industry, driven both by consumers’ increasing interest in taking charge of their health and soaring healthcare costs. Consumers driving this shift have notably different expectations from those of healthcare companies. At the same time, the entire consumer healthcare audience continues to be influenced by their experiential interactions outside the healthcare space, which is driving demand for similarly-calibered experiences within healthcare. Read More

  • No one wants digital tools that waste their time. 

    We all want digital experiences to offer time well spent. People engage when smart tools understand them, their situation, and the jobs they want to be done. But, too many companies today are still building digital platforms that waste people’s time. 

    So, what should companies be doing differently? Instead of “moments,” focus on “modes” — the mindset and set of behaviors that people get into temporarily to get a job done; for example, we can be in work mode one moment and mommy/daddy mode the next. Read More

  • Buying a home is the biggest investment most of us make; it can be a daunting and emotional process. What’s more, many feel they are not able to finance a home. Clayton Homes ®, a Berkshire Hathaway ® company and national builder of attainable housing, knew how people shop for homes is changing. They wanted to develop a meaningful online shopping experience that not only helps people overcome the barriers to homeownership but also helps them design a home built to fit their lives. Read More

  • Flagler Health+ was on a mission. They needed to develop a digital strategy that would improve the healthcare experience—and, more importantly, help them become a
    total care enterprise to advance the physical, social, and economic health of Northeast Florida communities. And they wanted to do it 24/7/365—not just for critical times when patients need acute care but for their overall wellness.

    When Flagler Health+ joined The Collaboratives, we worked to identify 10 ways to leverage digital tools to better engage patients and deliver a seamless experience. The Flagler Health+ team used their 10-idea research and past Digital Healthcare Collaborative research as the foundation of their future road map. Valuable past research included what makes a trusted partner, supporting behavior change, data experience design, and what is stupid, smart, and genius in healthcare. The Digital Healthcare Collaborative provided the space, research, and a process for Flagler Health+ to “Think Forward.” Read More

Co-creation research is executed through our 5 phase process:

  • We work with your team to ensure we know the value proposition hypotheses and what is most important to learn about the experience. We won’t spend time on things you already know or redo research that you’ve already completed. We review relevant foundational information and previous research and take it from there.

  • We will recruit participants based on your needs and criteria. We then filter this audience for creative, innovative people that can provide the forward-thinking input within our unique research approach. It takes three weeks to recruit the right people for quality feedback.

  • We create stimulus exercises that generate useful insights and interesting lines of thought among research participants. Our exercises leverage our proprietary frameworks and empower participants to provide the quality feedback you need. They also ensure we get deep feedback from each participant and not just the loudest person in the room.

  • We give participants two “bites at the apple” in our framing sessions to get to deeper insights and understand how to best create a meaningful experience. They also do homework in between the sessions to dive deeper and keep them thinking about solutions to the innovation challenge. We work with your team to ensure we are vetting a variety of internal hypotheses.

  • We use our proprietary frameworks and all the rich input from participants to give you deeper insights and a blueprint on how to move forward. Our clients appreciate how we hand-craft our approach to the level of involvement they want in the process: from not involved at all to highly involved. We work with you to determine how to best bring the insights back into your company, and are proud of our high quality deliverables.

With the Mantel Method, everyone’s opinion is heard and explored on every question. Our powerful technique allows participants to build off each other’s ideas and take ownership of the concepts to make them work. This takes extra preparation and analysis time but delivers better results.

Current and Past Clients

We Work Hard on Relationships

Our clients are our biggest advocates, here’s why:

  • Our handcrafted approach makes it easy for them to integrate our work into their work, teams, and culture. We do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to.

  • We love it when clients get as excited as we do about making a difference. We enjoy strengthening their knowledge and experience of design thinking and market research.

  • Our clients tell us that they continue to benefit from our custom-developed strategic frameworks over time, to inform their thinking and create alignment across different groups in their companies. They also learn from the toolkits, playbooks and frameworks we have created over the years in our thought leadership programs.

  • While a well-planned kickoff is key to any project, we know that ongoing communication is critical to ensure that interim deliverables and end results are actionable and exceed expectations.

What Our Clients Say

Scott Allen, Senior VP, Research and Market Intelligence Leader

“Stone Mantel has been a great partner over the years. They have been instrumental in bringing forth valuable insights through their unique co-creative research process. This process, together with their quantitative capabilities, has helped us develop several key initiatives and programs within the organization. They show up as true partners and really address the business issue at its core. We can always depend on them to provide insights and playbooks that are truly actionable.”

Michael Stanton, Director of CX

"We knew this research was a long-term investment. It has become our roadmap and aspirational target. Now we have the confidence that this direction will help more people achieve homeownership.”