When it comes to getting ideas and creativity flowing, sometimes laughter is the best option---at least, that's what leaders at Kantar and The Second City have found with their new collaborative improv-based event coming to Atlanta.
Kantar, a brand consultancy group based in the United Kingdom, has partnered with The Second City, Chicago's improv troupe, to create Brandstage, an improvisation-based consumer experience that acts grants consumer insight for brands. Brandstage will demo an event followed by a Q&A in Atlanta for local businesses at 1 p.m. on May 23 at the Whole World Improv Theater at 1216 Spring St. NW. Cocktails and networking will proceed at 4 p.m.
By combining The Second City's improv skills with Kantar's expertise in building brand strategy, Brandstage breaks barriers between brands and participants and gains consumer insights all while having fun, according to the leader of Brandstage and vice president of The Second City, Steve Kakos.
"What we really do is leverage improvisation and comedy to help our corporate clients engage audiences, much like we engage audiences in our theater every evening," he said. "We started running brands through this process of course in conjunction with Kantar, we found that it really marries the marketing strategy and expertise that Kantar has with a little bit of the way that’s unique with how we approach audiences."
The partnership developed when leaders at Kantar started to think there were other ways to engage consumers beyond their traditional marketing, CEO of Firefly, Kantar Millward Brown's North American qualitative research division, Cheryl Stallworth said. After running a pilot event with a willing client, Kantar and The Second City realized they had taped into a special exercise.
"We were onto something that would not only engage consumers at a higher level in terms of revealing their innermost feelings and thoughts---when people laugh, they open up kind of naturally," she said. "And so we learned that we were onto something and we did our first project together, and from that project, we learned that we were getting much deeper insight than more traditional insight methodology."
"It’s almost like an old film noir; we were both solving the same crime from different vantage points," Kakos said.
For the event itself, Kakos describes it like "The Matrix": No one can tell you what Brandstage is, you have to see it for yourself, he said. The Atlanta demo event is close to full capacity and has a waitlist.
Stallworth said it was important to create an event consumers would want to participate in and Brandstage really breaks the model of forming a brand strategy behind closed doors. This way, consumers are able to "join the party," she said.
"That’s the nature of the world we live in today," she said. "Everybody wants to have a voice...That’s what’s made this so magical."
