BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - Oct 28, 2011) - Today, Communispace, the leader in providing online consumer insights communities for the world's most esteemed brands, announced it's the recipient of a prestigious Forrester Groundswell Award for its Alberto Culver customer insight community. The fifth annual Forrester Groundswell Awards were announced this week at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago. Out of over 200 entries received in all categories, the Alberto Culver community won an award in the "Business to Consumer, North America" Embracing category. The Embracing category recognizes the best use of social media to involve customers in innovation. This is the fifth consecutive year Communispace has won a Forrester Groundswell Award with their clients.
"We're thrilled to see Alberto Culver's co-creation work recognized by a respected and knowledgeable organization like Forrester Research," said Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace. "Communities enable our clients to have a continuous connection to their consumers, and winning a Forrester Groundswell Award for the fifth time is a source of tremendous pride for our company."
"Once again, we received excellent entries for the Forrester Groundswell Awards from around the world," said Josh Bernoff, senior vice president, idea development at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell and Empowered. "We selected the winners based on the most impressive results from among over 200 entrants this year."
Forrester Groundswell Award Winner
Alberto Culver: Co-creation Leads to Product Launch that Invigorates the Hair Care Category
Category Winner: Business to Consumer, North America, Embracing
Alberto Culver has historically been a relatively small company in a hair care industry that has Fortune 500 companies as direct competitors. With a vision of being the fastest-growing, most respected beauty-care company globally, Alberto Culver acknowledged the importance of embracing the voice of the consumer and launched its first private online community, My Beauty Cafe, in May of 2007 to infuse its core consumers in every step of the co-creation process.
As part of the discovery work conducted in the community, a universal truth became apparent -- specifically, the reality that women struggle to feel fresh and rejuvenated on the days that they do not shampoo. With this truth in hand, the co-creation process that led to the launch of the TRESemmé Fresh Start dry shampoo product line began. By involving their consumers throughout the development process, Alberto Culver was able to confidently launch the TRESemmé Fresh Start dry shampoo product line in January 2010 and thereby helped to establish a sizeable dry shampoo category in the mass channels. TRESemmé Fresh Start has become the number one brand in the dry shampoo mass channel in both volume and value. By the end of 2010, Fresh Start achieved retail sales topping $7.7 million; and year two remains strong as TRESemmé Fresh Start is on target to exceed year one's revenue.
"We have been able to leverage our hair care beauty community on so many fronts -- from early-on identification of needs and getting deeper into the female hair care psyche, all the way through to packaging and communication optimization for initiatives going into market," said Cynthia Nelson, Senior Manager of Global Hair Care for Alberto Culver. "Fresh Start is a great example of how were able to listen to the consumer and user throughout the creation and refinement process, resulting in real brand and category growth."
The Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize excellence in achieving business and organizational goals with social technology applications. The awards program was developed to support and recognize the principles outlined in the Forrester Research books Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Press, 2010).
About Communispace:
The world's most admired brands turn to Communispace, the leader in generating game-changing insights via private online customer communities. Founded in 1999, the company has created more than 400 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Hilton Hotels Corporation. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the company has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco, as well as Imperia, Italy and Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit: www.communispace.com.
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