More on Focus Groups

I couldn't agree more with Seth’s thoughts on traditional focus groups. While companies spend over $1 billion on focus groups, some basic flaws plague this methodology.

First, they are conducted in facilities that strip away the context of the customer’s life. How can anyone talk about the experience of driving a car without sitting in a car seat and talking about it in the context of the activity?

Other issues, such as groupthink and bullying among focus group participants, only compound the problems with focus groups. How do you take people out of the context of their lives and spend two hours in a strange environment, trying to cover ten topics with eight people?

This gives each participant only a couple of minutes to react. How can you make significant strategic decisions after only getting to know a person for a couple of minutes? Can you really use this information to design a product or marketing campaign that expresses a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, and creates a space that allows them to co-create?

When many companies concentrate primarily on increasing their sales by using static top-down techniques, with only a secondary hope of developing deeper relationships with their customers, no agency or consultant can benefit them in the long term.

To enact real bottom-up change in the marketplace, companies must incorporate their use of consultants and agencies, as partners, to help shape their brands and products based on their customers’ wants and needs – they must intimately know their customers at the front end of the process, not only as an afterthought. This ongoing engagement allows the essential space for co-creation.

The bottom line is that an intimate relationship with your customers has to begin before you offer them a product, brand, or service. Their insights, needs, and desires should be driving production from the bottom-up at the front end, and sales thereafter.

Comments

[Laurent Flores]

Hi John - I can not agree more...and am glad to see that quite a few of us think along the same lines. A few months back, I compared focus groups to "aquariums" commenting on the same flaws you highlight here (and as Seth does). Check out the post, will be interesting in your thoughs...

http://customerlistening.typepad.com/customer_listening/2006/03/so_why_focus_gr.html

It seems that believing in "Customer Listening" allows us to think outside "traditional" market research avenues.
Hope that we can connect soon.
Best
Laurent Flores

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