Focus Groups in Focus - Link Roundup
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, May 29, 2010
Focus groups were in focus this week in the MR blogosphere.
While most organizations don't do focus groups, one organization -- Locog (the London Olympic committee) -- apparently did too many and yet still missed the point about their new mascot. As Mark Ritson puts it:
The killer proof point: the design had been guided by public reaction with "over 40 focus groups" commissioned as part of the process.
A note to Locog and Iris: anyone who commissions 40 focus groups does not know what they are doing. Focus groups are a qualitative method - they offer insights not representation. After four or five groups, you take the insights into quantitative research. Doing so many focus groups suggests that you are either lacking in expertise or over-compensating. I suspect it's the latter, because I can't believe that in so many groups, none of the 300 or so participants pointed out the obvious.
The obvious being... well, you'll have to see for yourself.
Challenging just this type of reliance on focus groups, Dan Ariely takes aim as well:
When businesses want to find answers to questions in marketing, whom do they ask? Do they set up experiments to test their ideas, pitting the approach they think is most effective against alternatives? Do they survey consumers on a large scale? Do they go to experts who have questioned and requestioned their theories? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Most often, businesses rely on small "focus groups" to answer big questions. They rely on the intuition of about 10-12 lay people with no relevant training who ultimately have no idea what they're talking about.
Actually, I think Dan has no idea what he is talking about, in this case. My friends who run focus group facilities would like to live in the universe he describes. Most businesses, even small businesses, do surveys, simply because they are so much cheaper. (That said, Dan's work in general is very illuminating for market research: check out Social Norms and Market Norms in Online Communities and Encouraging Honesty from Survey Respondents and Community Members .)
From Dan Ariely, we go to Dan Womack and his post, Researchers: Are you Lonely Enough?, in which he and (in the comments) Margaret Roller share anecdotes about focus groups uncovering negative attitudes and insights that were important for the client to hear and learn from. Unfortunately, too often the client wants to shoot the moderator rather than listen to the harsh truths uncovered by the groups.
Kathleen Kusek of Firehouse Marketing Services believes moderators themselves need to recognize some harsh truths about consumers today, and she argues for a transformation of the traditional group: What will the Focus Group of the Future Look Like?
And if you missed it in the April edition of Research magazine, Alistair Leathwood of FreshMinds Research said, "Hear me out: Let's get focus group participants drunk." Just don't let them design Olympic logos while they're drunk, okay?
Other headlines making the rounds of the MR tweetosphere: