Co-Creation Research: A more impactful way to design experiences.

Unlike focus groups, co-creation research is designed to learn more and eliminate group bias. 

We work with your team up front to create rich stimulus that provides strong feedback on the value propositions and the key components of the experience. We don’t create discussion guides or hear from just the loudest voice(s) in the group. 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.

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.

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, Truist

“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.”