The youth are the vanguard of change. And they’ve changed the world of marketing forever. Brands can no longer dictate, they must now collaborate.

At Instant Grass, we collaborate 24/7 with a network of the most connected, informed and influential young people, to create consumer-driven solutions for some of the best brands in the world.

This intimate collaboration allows us to unlock powerful insights and connection points, deliver fresh and unexpected product ideas, and generate credible and contagious word-of-mouth and brand advocacy.

If you’re a brand wanting to engage with the youth at a whole new level, or if you’re a young person who wants to be heard by the brands that make up your world, then welcome to Instant Grass.

Traditional research methods are increasingly obsolete. At Instant Grass, we pioneered a conversational approach to gathering insights and intelligence, to create a natural environment where honest thoughts and feelings are shared. Our grasses know they can be completely blunt with us, and that their words will go straight from their lips to the Marketing Director’s ears. And because we are in touch with them in real-time through our online Greenhouse system, we can tell clients what’s going on, whilst it’s still happening (that’s where the Instant bit comes in…). But an insight is useless unless you do something with it. So for us, a good insight is like a refrigerator: when you look into it, a light goes on.

Gone are the days when the men in white coats drove the innovation process. In today’s Wikinomic world, it is the forward-thinking consumer saying ‘this is what we want, now go and make it’. Instant Grass has been using its Colab process for the last 2 years in South Africa, Russia and Japan to help global and local companies harness the power of consumer collaboration to inspire, generate and evaluate new product and packaging ideas.

From Levi”s Eva jeans, to new mobile applications, from new drinks and chocolate bars to new retail designs and activation concepts, we’ve solved our clients’ problems with simple and relevant ideas from the best Creative Director around: the consumer.

Youth don’t believe what they’re told. At least, not when it comes to conventional marketing messages. The only people they believe are each other. We take a strategic approach to creating word-of-mouth for our clients, putting the ‘stickiest’ stories and content in the hands of the right people, and in the right places where the conversations are happening, online and offline. It‘s about listening and participating, not shouting and selling.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most iconic youth brands in the world. Brands that recognise the need to talk with, not at, their consumers. We’ve also worked with a lot of brands in a lot of categories that might not appear to be for the youth. But these forward thinking clients have realised that, with 65% of the population under the age of 24, they had better start the conversation sooner rather than later.