Kantar And Second City Works Form Joint Venture, Brandstage™
Collaboration aims to evolve the creative process, mixing improv with consumer understanding to drive growth for brands
NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP, and one of the world's largest insight, information and consultancy groups, announced today it has formed a joint venture with Second City Works, the corporate services division of The Second City, the world's largest school of improvisation and foremost comedy theater company. The unique collaboration, marketed as Brandstage™, will work with marketing organizations to drive new product innovation, originate captivating marketing and communications ideas, explore customer experience opportunities and remove the guesswork and over-reliance on dated, silo-based groupthink from critical marketing initiatives.
"Our partnership with Second City Works cements one of our most innovative, impactful offers within Kantar," said Tim Wragg, CEO of Kantar, Insights, North America. "Many clients have already benefited from the power of Brandstage to explore brand growth initiatives and we look forward to expanding our offer to help our clients and WPP partners get the most out of our collaboration."
Second City Works uses award-winning improvisational methods and audience-centered collaboration with consumer audiences. Its creative tools have proven highly successful for clients since the offering's beginnings in 2014, and the initial alliance in 2015 between Second City Works and Kantar Millward Brown's qualitative practice, Firefly, to launch Consumer Theatre, now renamed Brandstage.
Kolby Blackham, Senior Research Manager, Surface Brand, Microsoft, added, "Brandstage gave us a wealth of fresh consumer insights that we hadn't heard before, and that we are still using to help inform marketing decisions six months later."
"We believe laughter, or no laughter at all, is a powerful insight," said Steve Johnston, President of The Second City. "For the last 60 years, Second City has used its improvisation-based creative techniques to gauge the response of an audience and to measure the totality of an idea. The same methods we use to take the cultural temperature of a captive audience at Second City can be used to determine the effectiveness of a particular campaign, brand message or content territory."
More information can be found at https://brandstagesc.com/
About Second City Works
Second City Works (SCW) is the B2B arm of the world-renowned theater, The Second City. Powered by an iconic legacy and a vast investment in scientific clinical research, SCW brings award-winning improvisation, comedy and audience-driven techniques to every type of business. To date, SCW has worked with over 600 Fortune 1000 companies around the world, delivering high-energy experiential learning, live events, workshops, and custom digital content to organizations seeking a more empowered, creative, and collaborative business culture.
About Kantar
Kantar is the world's leading data, insight, and consultancy company. Working together across the whole spectrum of research and consulting disciplines, its specialist brands, employing 30,000 people, provide inspirational insights and business strategies for clients in 100 countries. Kantar is part of WPP and its services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies.
For further information, please visit us at www.kantar.com.
SOURCE Kantar Millward Brown
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