Focus groups are so much fun. And clients love them. There’s almost nothing as rewarding for a client as seeing a room full of customers and prospects talking about their products.
The problem is that focus groups have very limited utility. Let me say that again…VERY LIMITED! I have found that it is often dangerous for clients to observe focus group sessions (or even read summary reports of those sessions) because they often create expectations that may not at all be appropriate.
Are focus groups valuable? They can be. But most groups suffer from a serious flaw that almost always skews the results.
Focus Group research can be exceptionally valuable in planning, strategy development and message evaluation. Even though this research technique is often misused, this “qualitative” exercise can produce information that could never be gathered through any other research method. When I say the method is often misused, I am referring to people/companies conducting focus groups and then making the assumption that the data gathered are generalizable to a larger population. Focus groups can’t reflect a larger group with measurable accuracy – only a quantitative study based on randomness can do that. But that does not mean they are useless.
The greatest value of focus groups is that it takes advantage of the human side of communication. It recognizes the impact that human interaction in a social structure has in shaping an individual’s perceptions and motivating that person to act (or not act). Another significant advantage of the technique is that researchers can put printed materials in their hands or expose them to other aural or visual stimuli. When one adds this capability to the situation that fosters peer interaction and information sharing (approximating the opinion leader process), the technique can produce insightful results.
The key is selecting the “right” people. It’s entirely possible that when you measure, let’s say, 4 focus groups, each having 15 people (60 people), that the majority of those people are not at all representative of your target group. There are some things you can do to increase the representativeness of the people you are studying.
The most important thing you can do is to NEVER let people volunteer for the groups. Most people would not volunteer, so that means that those who do volunteer are not like the majority of the people you are wanting to study. The key is to draw a random sample and then “ask” them to participate.
Here’s an example. A few years ago I did a series of focus groups for an automobile manufacturer. They wanted in-depth comments from buyers about their buying/dealership experiences. They were trying to figure out why some dealerships had good sales and others in the same metro area with similar demographics did not. And why some dealerships did a lot of company financing and why others did not, etc….. So they sent me a list of every person who had recently purchased one of their cars in some selected metro areas. I had each buyer’s name, address, phone number, the dealership of purchase, types of financing and the type of vehicle they bought. I matched those local sales with the sales profile of the vehicles they sold.
Then once the profiles were drawn, I made sure I invited people who bought all types of vehicles (sedans, SUVs, pick-ups, sports cars, etc) and also included the proper proportion of fleet and corporate buyers. We send letters and made personalized follow-up phone calls. In the end, I had a good group of buyers of each type of vehicle, from each dealership (in proportion to their sales), two types of financing customers, plus cash customers. And to keep the effects of “convenience” from being too great, I held the groups in two hotels in two different parts each city. In other words, it was a lot of work making sure the right people were there.
Had I just sent a letter to the list they provided and let people volunteer into the groups, I would have had a ton of people who were unemployed or lonely, too many who lived close to the research sites, too many people who had purchased inexpensive cars (not busy working), no corporate/fleet buyers, and a bunch of folks who either were mad at the manufacturer and wanted to speak their mind or who were car nuts and would attend anything that was remotely related to anything with a steering wheel.
Once we got the buyers in the sessions, they gave us some great information. More importantly, we observed human interactions to various stimuli, what language people used to describe good and bad experiences, and how they persuaded others to come to their point of view.
It sure would have been good had we been able to say that what we observed was applicable to all their buyers, but of course, it wasn’t. Helpful? Yes. Accurate? Maybe. Representative? I have no idea. But we did learn some useful things.
