Focus Groups vs. Online Communities

In a similar way that web surveys have replaced telephone surveys in many applications, feedback-oriented online communities will replace focus groups in many instances.

                                               

	1990s	2000s
Quantitative	Telephone survey	Web survey
Qualitative	Focus group	Feedback community

Focus groups are better than online communities in one key dimension:  they take place in the real world, where you can show people real products and have them interact with them, where you can look participants in the eye and get a sense of their emotions as they tell you something.  But that benefit is not enough.

Focus groups draw from fewer participants than online communities. They are bounded by geographic restrictions that can make it hard to recruit from niche markets.  They draw from small groups of participants and therefore have much higher costs per participant than online communities.  An opinionated participant can distort discussion in a room in a way that doesn't happen in an online forum.

But the biggest advantage of online communities is that they become an asset.  Where focus groups are variable costs, online communities are fixed costs.  Where focus groups must be organized to address the issue at hand, not providing results for weeks or months, online communities are like standing focus groups that can provide answers in hours or days.  Where focus groups can only provide qualitative research, well-designed marketing-research online communities can provide qualitative and quantitative research.

                                                                                                                                                               

	Focus Group	Online Community
Medium	In person	Online
Participant Size	8-12	100s-1000s
Respondent Bias	Medium	Low
Time Frame	2 hours	Years
Turnaround Time	Weeks-Months	Hours-Days
Geography	Major Metropolitan Area	Worldwide
Cost	Variable	Fixed
Cost per Response	High	Low
Methodology	Qualitative	Qualitative & Quantitative

I always enjoyed focus-group research.  I enjoyed writing the discussion guides, moderating the events or sitting behind the glass watching the moderator, transcribing the results afterwards and preparing a report and presentation.  Heck, I even enjoyed the travel.  But I was young, and didn't realize that every city in America looked the same from a focus-group facility. 

Geez, I remember reading about a half dozen books on focus groups.  I even wrote software (Perseus FocusReports) to use to transcribe and analyze focus groups.  I partnered with a great focus-group facility.  I thought I'd always do focus groups.  But I was young.