Polycular and yes! Of course

Organic Adventure for Digital Kids

If you want to reach the consumers of tomorrow today, you have to come up with new ideas. "But what?" asked the brand managers. Yes! Of course of Rewe International AG. And above all: How must the importance of organic farming be packaged so that it is recognised? To find answers to these questions, startups were invited to a Design Thinking process. The Hallein agency Polycular won the competition. Playful.

"Co-farmers" is the dictum behind the idea of yes! Organic Farm App. Together with many start-ups, we have already been working with the HUB to find out how we can involve organic lovers even more in 2015: in the production process, in quality assurance or simply in information about organic food. Out of many excellent ideas from fellow farmers the Yes! Biohof App emerged as the winner from many excellent ideas from fellow farmers," recalls Martina Hörmer, managing director of Ja! Of course, at the start of the project at the Impact Hub Vienna.

Together with the Management Board of Ja! Of course, ten teams spent a day illuminating the organic range from a variety of perspectives and questioning everything. For Yes! Of course, it was important to develop the brand innovatively while maintaining the traditional core messages of the brand. At the end of the day, ten different design proposals were on the table. One of the three sketches to be worked on was by Thomas Layer-Wagner and his team, and after another three months Polycular was finally chosen as the winner of the competition.

Sowing, harvesting, driving a tractor

"And the success of this gamification solution proves that we made the absolutely right decision," says Hörmer. Polycular has been working on an offer for digital natives who will give their children access to digital games while ensuring that these games are free of advertising and not subject to a fee. Accordingly, Layer-Wagner and his team wanted to avoid product advertising and still convey the core theme of the brand - sustainable agriculture.

The result is yes! Biohof and has been working as a mobile educational game app on iOS and Android mobile phones for eight months. In the game, the children manage an organic farm as piglets, they are allowed to drive a tractor, build a barn and learn in the course of the game where the ingredients for bread, jam or yoghurt come from. They learn how long it takes from sowing to harvesting and which complex processes are necessary to ensure that the products end up in the shopping basket ready for consumption. "Within a few weeks, the app achieved more than 13,000 installs and the ratings were extremely positive," says Ja! Of course, online manager Corinna Bold. "The reactions show us that this concept has met the needs of children from 6 to 10 and their parents."

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Learning fields on both sides

Bold sees the creative economy effect on the one hand in the technical expertise and on the other hand in the inventiveness of the team, whose reliability she has come to appreciate during the long period of cooperation. This is not a matter of course, because the long processes in a large company were new to the creative people. "It took a year from the commitment to the start of the project. "It takes time for ideas to be flushed through all channels. Some things can't be implemented because of this, but in such a large company you have completely different possibilities," sums up Thomas Layer-Wagner. "We learned a lot - as a team and in app and game development.

The project has made it even clearer that learning must be rethought. "You have to think carefully about how the content is structured so that learning works with the new gadgets." Polycular now wants to use the charisma of "surely the most important project in our young company history" to position itself even more strongly in the field of Educational Technology: "We are interested in transformative learning." New thinking spaces, changes in the mindset, playful learning with lasting effect.

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