A coproduction framework for marketers: Pulling together service users and marketing teams to create your marketing strategy
Before becoming a marketing consultant, I worked across various sectors, including the charity sector and one of the things all these sectors have struggled with is the voice of the customer (or in charity sector case the service user). How do you ensure their voice is heard, understood and used to develop your products or services? Well, the honest answer is that this is a tricky thing to do and get the balance right! But we believe at Marketing Moments the first step is intent, and this is why we have pulled together a framework that organisations could use to build co-production into their marketing team’s practice.
Implementing a marketing co-production framework in 2026 requires a shift from viewing service users as case studies to treating them as equal strategic partners. This also means being willing to give away some of your power/control to create the right environment.
We believe the following core-principals need to run throughout any co-production or engagement activity you do with service users:
Equality: Ensure no one’s voice is more important than another; power is shared between professionals and users from the start.
Diversity: Proactively include underrepresented groups to avoid "echo chambers" or tokenism.
Reciprocity: Provide tangible rewards for participation such as payment, training, or gift vouchers to value their expertise as equal to staff.
Accessibility: Use plain language. We think this one is really key in the world of marketing where our love for a good anagram is parallel to our need for caffeine. And ensure all physical or digital environments (e.g., accessible websites/meetings) allow full participation.
The co-production marketing framework
We have split our framework into four areas to help you consider co-design, decision-making, co-delivery and co-evaluation. The main thing for us is to define upfront whether you’re service users are going to be involved in all stages or some of the stages, this helps to manage expectations on both sides and will reduce chances of conflict at different stages.
Phase 1: Co-design: strategy & concept
We know when marketing teams are time poor it can be tempting to jump straight into the challenge or opportunity you want to tackle with the group. But in this case take the time to establish psychological safety between the team you have assembled. Why not start with a workshop that is just about building relationships, getting to know how each other want to work and defining how you will work together before starting the project.
This gives you a chance to establish from day 1 people’s communication preferences but also gives you a deeper understanding of their motivations and any anxieties people may have. One of the things we have observed when doing this type of work with teams over the years, is your employees are often the more anxious ones. They are worried about saying something wrong, safeguarding or just a general sense of what if the service users feel let down by the process. We think it is really important to tackle this upfront, so you know how to support your team.
“Also though, you do need to understand the processes and what you are going to do in certain scenarios. For example, early in my career I was running a workshop with foster children under the age of 10 where I was getting them to decorate salt dough foster carers (like gingerbread men but you can’t eat them) and was asking them prompting questions about what makes a good foster carer and what they wanted me to focus on when trying to recruit more. Halfway through this session one of the children made a safeguarding disclosure.
It is worth mentioning I was young and immediately out of my depth, and very happy to have a senior social worker in the room that quickly took over and did all the required actions and told me what to do. But the reality is that if you are working closely with service users you are going to hear things you need to action. So make sure your team is ready and aware of processes.”
A big part of team building is understanding and using each other’s strengths, so we would recommend getting everyone to introduce themselves with three things they are really good at, so you can identify people’s skills and strengths.
As marketers we love a plan! But in this case try not to over plan and avoid coming with a finished brief. Start with a blank canvas and define what you’re going to achieve together. We like to start with developing a problem statement, so it could be for example:
“Usage of our East Kent Service to support bereaved parents has declined. We are unsure of why and want to increase usage and update the service to meet service users needs”
Using this as your starting point you could create a shared vision of where you want this service to be in 3-5 years and then go onto create campaign goals and your roadmap for how you are going to tackle this problem statement together. The benefit of having lived experience in the room is that you can really get under the skin of the problem and use this to strengthen your persona development. Move beyond the basic demographics and uncover the true motivations and barriers of the target audience. You will discover things that you just didn’t know, but also then kick yourself for not knowing, because when you do know they will seem so obvious.
Phase 2: Co-decision making: resource allocation
You’ve defined your vision and roadmap of what you’re going to do, we would recommend assigning roles upfront and making it clear who is doing what and the expectations of the team at every stage. One of the common pitfalls we see in collaborative working in general is that role ambiguity causes unnecessary tension, can slow down decision making and prevent progress. That is why we are always a fan of defining this upfront rather than during a project as things arise.
We would recommend using something like a RACI Matrix, that defines who is responsible, who is accountable (where the buck stops), who will be consulted, who will be informed. This recognises that not every member of the group you’ve put together needs to be involved in each stage or decision. Instead, effective collaborative working is about ensuring the right people and right skills are being used at the right stage.
Sometimes there is a temptation to keep the financial or budgeting elements away from the service users, but we would recommend having service users involved in the budgeting process. This will help them with understanding of the project and scope, but also they can be a critical friend on whether or not they would recommend certain things.
In a lot of ways, you’re thinking about this in the way that you would lead a project normally, how are you going to get the best out of people and what support do they need from you to shine. With the added element of you need to consider more how this is benefiting the service user and how they might want to use this experience to move forward their own personal or career goals.
Phase 3: Co-delivery: Execution
When it gets to the point of implementing or executing your plan think about ways of keeping a mixture of people updated, some of which might not be able to attend too many meetings or give up loads of time. Set up project management tools such as Trello or a Team Board to help you keep track of actions and think about milestone moments where you are going to provide project updates and think through how you are going to do this. For example, could you make every other update a virtual meeting and the alternative one an email update.
If you are developing product or service improvements together think through whether you need any additional employees in your working group, for example, do you need the operations team their to make things happen? A top tip is to try and make it super engaging, run workshops, define service improvement processes, identify opportunities, prioritise opportunities and flesh out the detail together. This will really add the diversity of thought to your ideas, but also give you loads of rich information you can use to inform the future direction.
Having service users help you to decide your priority communication channels based on where they want to hear from you is a great way to both be customer-centric, but also prevent your team from wasting energy on a channel that is not going to pay-off for you. Involving service users also gives you the opportunity to use authentic storytelling. Empower service users to lead on content creation rather than just featuring in it. In 2025, this increasingly involved short-form video (Reels/TikTok).
Phase 4: Co-evaluation: Measuring success
There is an opportunity when evaluating the success of your marketing campaign or project to move past standard metrics (clicks, likes, footfall) to co-designed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure qualitative impact on community trust and wellbeing. There are softer benefits that you want to make sure you capture as they will help you to justify and persuade your seniors to prioritise more co-production activity in the future.
Marketing is something that is continuously evolving and something like this is no different. This is why we encourage organisations to go into this with the view of continuously learning and improving. We would recommend conducting regular co-produced reviews to audit whether principles like equality and accessibility were upheld throughout the project.
Get in touch to see how we can help
At Marketing Moments we are passionate about supporting brands to work effectively with customers and service users to develop their marketing strategy. If you would like to see how we could help your marketing team in 2026 get in touch.
