How Can I Involve Customers or Early Adopters in Evolving the Brand?

The moment a user says  something about your product that nails the positioning better than your homepage copy, or they reveal a use case you hadn’t considered, or a pain point hiding in plain sight. That’s the foundation of brand co-creation. Customers don’t just use your product, they help you evolve it.

In this article, I’ll break down how to turn early adopter marketing into a competitive edge and build lasting customer brand engagement that drives retention. With customer acquisition costs up 222% over the last eight years, growth-stage brands can’t afford to treat buyers as bystanders. Brand co-creation is a strategic move that compounds over time. Let’s look at how to do it well.

What is the meaning of co-creation?

Let’s clear this up: brand co-creation isn’t slapping a name on a product or choosing a color palette your consumer likes. That’s customization, surface-level and one-directional. Co-creation is when customers actively help shape what you build, how you position it, and even what your brand stands for.

Nike started with basic sneaker personalization (Nike By You, formerly known as NikeiD), but now mines user design data to inform entire collections. That’s the shift, from personal taste to collective influence. Co-creation happens when early adopters and customers become collaborators in your innovation process, not just consumers of the outcome.

Why does co-creation matter for growth?

According to McKinsey, co-created products are 20% more likely to succeed, but the upside doesn’t stop at product-market fit. When customers help build the brand, they stick around longer, spend more, and sell it for you. That’s the ROI: higher retention, stronger advocacy, and real brand equity.

Passive audiences are gone. Today’s customers expect to shape the brands they support. They’ve grown up editing, remixing, co-producing, and they bring that mindset to every brand interaction. Early adopters, especially, are wired to push boundaries. If you’re not involving them in your brand’s evolution, your competitors will.

How to identify and engage the right co-creation partners?

Early adopters are first to care about your product. They value innovation over polish, give fast feedback, and often lead conversations in their circles. They’re also the ones pushing your product beyond its intended use, revealing where the real opportunities are. 

That silence from satisfied users is a missed signal. If you’re not actively inviting reflection from both ends of the spectrum, you’re building on half the insight.

How to spot your co-creation partners and adaptors?

Don’t cast a wide net. Instead, go deep. Prioritize customers who:

• Engage regularly with your product or community
• Offer unsolicited feedback (especially constructive criticism)
• Advocate for your product organically
• Create workarounds or stretch use cases

These users reveal gaps, friction points, and growth potential. Sometimes, your most valuable insights won’t come from the customer with the highest lifetime value. They’ll come from the one who cared enough to write that detailed bug report.

How to make engagement a two-way street?

Giving early adopters exclusive access is a start, but real brand co-creation needs ongoing, two-way dialogue. That means more than surveys. It means carving out space for direct, human interaction: Slack groups, async video replies, live calls, even a shared Notion doc. Whatever the format, it has to feel personal, and it has to be easy for them to respond. As Suren puts it:

Any early-stage feedback is already a big win. It takes time to find the right people, build trust, and actually get on a call.

The brands that win are the ones who invest in these relationships early, before they need the insight.

5 proven brand co-creation strategies

Before I introduce the tactics, know this: co-creation doesn’t mean handing over your roadmap. It means letting customers influence the right parts of it, at the right time. In the following five strategies, you’ll see how leading brands do it (even ones outside SaaS), and how you can adapt those same approaches to your context. Each one includes clear next steps and some insights from our own product team at 10Web, where co-creation is baked into how we build.

1. Product development partnerships

Let’s start with a well known example: LEGO. They don’t simply accept fan ideas. Instead, they give customers the tools to prototype products, build traction with other fans, and influence what hits the shelves, not with a feedback form, but as a part of the pipeline.

This works because LEGO integrates after listening to feedback. By the time a product launches, it’s already validated by the people most likely to buy it.

You’re not LEGO, or a similar industry. You don’t need to be. If you’re in SaaS or IT, the shift is more subtle but just as powerful. You don’t need thousands of ideas, you need a clear system for surfacing the right ones and knowing what to do with them.

What to do:

• Build a beta program that prioritizes decision-making, not just bug discovery
• Follow up with users who voted to understand the why, not just the what

At 10Web, we’ve learned that suggestion volume alone doesn’t mean much. Suren, our VP of Product, emphasizes pattern recognition: “We look for clusters of similar feedback, layers in usage data, and ask, does this align with where we’re actually going?” Only after this are the ideas integrated. 

What to track: Feature adoption, response times from idea to release, and satisfaction among contributors. You’ll also see a lift in retention when customers recognize their input in the final product.

2. Content and storytelling collaboration

Gymshark is notorious for brand co-creation in marketing. As part of their early adopter marketing, they partnered with athletes and fitness creators, not just to promote the product, but to highlight what those users personally valued about it. Instead of pushing their own message, they let the community shape what the brand stood for.

What to do:

• Run campaigns that ask users to show (not tell) how they use your product in real life
• Collect user phrasing from support chats, community threads, or reviews and use it to rewrite your messaging
• Invite customers to co-host webinars, write knowledge base articles, or walk through their workflows on video

Suren pointed out a simple but recurring blind spot at 10Web: the way we describe features often doesn’t match how users talk about them. Syncing with power users has helped us reposition functionality, uncover new use cases, and tighten our copy across channels.

What to track: Engagement on UGC vs. brand-led content, message clarity in surveys or support tickets, and lift in organic referrals or branded search. When users see themselves reflected in your brand, they sell it for you.

3. Community-driven brand values

Notion didn’t build a values-driven brand through ads. They did it by giving power users the space to shape the narrative. Even today, creators and community members are sharing workflows, productivity philosophies, even personal systems. Over time, “tool for thought” wasn’t just a tagline, but how the community defined the brand.

You don’t need a massive community to make this work, because Notion was doing this with their early adopters as well. Identify what your most engaged users believe your brand represents, and build from there.

What to do:

• Run small group calls or async surveys asking power users what your product stands for, and what it doesn’t
• Map where customer values and your brand’s stated values overlap
• Use that insight to sharpen your voice, messaging, and roadmap filters

When brand values come from users, you get real alignment, and with it, long-term loyalty.

Once you’ve identified the language your users use to describe you, tools like the free 10Web’s Slogan Generateor, together with Mission/Vision Statement Generators can help you turn that insight into your real brand identity.

What to track: Perceived brand values vs. intended values (qual), advocacy rates, and consistency in how customers describe your brand across platforms.

4. Service and experience design

Let’s look at Figma for this strategy. Instead of relying on assumptions, they observed usage patterns, ran onboarding feedback sessions, and studied where teams got stuck. That’s how features like multiplayer editing and canvas comments came to life – not from ideas, but from friction.

You don’t need to be a design tool to apply this. What matters is turning user friction into clear design decisions, fast.

What to do:

• Host real-time onboarding or workflow sessions with users, record and tag moments of hesitation or confusion
• Set up in-product prompts where users can upvote/downvote elements of the experience (like Reddit, but inside your UI)
• Track repeated support issues weekly. If a complaint shows up 2–3 times, escalate it, don’t wait for volume

At 10Web, we saw this firsthand. Users were repeatedly getting locked out of their sites due to a site lock feature. It came in as scattered support tickets at first, but patterns emerged. After routing the issue to our core and product teams, they made backend and UX improvements. Related tickets dropped from 50 a week to near-zero! This co-creation step didn’t just help the loud users, it helped the silent majority who never complained.

What to track: Drop-offs in key journeys, frequency of repeat support tickets by topic, and satisfaction with the experience post-fix. Small experience wins, especially when driven by users, often yield the biggest drops in churn.

5. Innovation and future visioning

Loom brings early adopters into the product development process. They use async feedback tools and get feedback from their Loom Insider community: share early concepts, gather real-world input, and use that to shape what gets built and why. This goes beyond product validation and into brand co-creation on a strategic level.

If you’re treating early adopter marketing only as a launch tactic, you’re missing the bigger opportunity. These users don’t just want early access, they want to influence what’s next.

What to do:

• Create a lightweight insider program where forward-thinking users get early access to experiments, not just features
• Ask users to record how they would use a new concept or feature, not just react to mockups
• Use their feedback to shape use cases, documentation, even naming, before your team locks it in

What to track: % of roadmap influenced by early adopter input, success rate of features tested through this process, and long-term retention among insiders.

Brand co-creation implementation framework

If we had to rebuild our co-creation process tomorrow, this is the playbook we’d use, because it’s the one that delivered actual results at 10Web.

First, don’t jump into co-creation campaigns without the basics. Before anything public-facing, we built systems to capture feedback inside the product and through community spaces. That meant setting up Slack groups, adding in-app feedback prompts, and creating workflows to route and prioritize what came in. Without that foundation, you’re just collecting noise.

Next, we launched a small, focused pilot tied to one product area. A Slack community, an embedded voting system, and regular updates back to users made it clear their input mattered, even when we didn’t build exactly what they asked for. That visibility built trust fast.

Once we saw traction, we scaled carefully. What made the difference wasn’t more tools, it was treating our support team like a strategic channel. A surprising number of insights came straight from support logs. As our product VP put it: co-creation often starts in customer care, you just need to notice it and act.

What’s made this sustainable is restraint. We only invite feedback where we’re willing to make decisions. We don’t overpromise, and we make sure someone owns the loop, end to end. Otherwise, it’s just theater.

Set your brand up for co-creation

Before you invite customers into co-creation, make sure your brand identity gives them something real to engage with. The 10Web’s free Brand Kit helps you generate a clean logo, favicon, website design, and brand-aligned messaging in seconds, so you can move fast and stay consistent as your brand evolves. You’re not involved in design work or formatting stress. Just input a few words, and get everything you need to start building with your users.

Go from idea to complete brand in minutes.

Takeaways

Co-creation isn’t a campaign. It’s a long-term strategy for building a brand with your customers, not just for them. The brands that lead today aren’t louder,they’re more collaborative.

Here’s what we’ve learned at 10Web that’s worth applying:

• Early adopter marketing works best when it’s about involvement, not just early access. Invite feedback before features are baked.
• Customer brand engagement doesn’t come from collecting feedback, it comes from acting on it, visibly and consistently.
• The best co-creation programs don’t start with a big splash. They start with one team, one space, and one repeatable loop.

You don’t need more ideas, you need clearer systems for turning insight into action. Start small, build trust, and treat feedback as a product asset, not a side channel.

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