5 steps to more productive focus groups
When you hang out in focus group facilities, you hear people laughing about how the main reason to go to focus groups is the food. They laugh about eating M&Ms as their hors’ d’oeurvres, followed by the ethnic food of the day. If you live on the wild side, there might even be wine.
So why all the laughing about food when the point is to listen to people talk about your brand? I think it’s because the process can be so painful – for the clients as well as the people participating in the groups. The clients sit in a small, dark room for way too many hours as the people participating in the research try to respond intelligently to questions that they might not even find relevant.. This assessment is somewhat harsh; at the same time, it embraces a fundamental truth. (Full disclosure: I have moderated somewhere close to 2000 focus groups and seen this up close and personal).
That’s what led us to explore how we might make focus groups more productive and more fun, for all parties. We put a lot of emphasis on the “fun” part because we know that a sense of fun makes people feel relaxed. And that sense of relaxation leads to more authenticity – from both the participants and the clients.
So in the spirit of that observation, here are five suggestions for improving your focus group experience and outcomes:
1) Focus as much (if not more) on feelings as behavior. We are sentient beings. We make decisions emotionally as well as rationally. In fact, research suggests we are led by our emotions – not facts and reason. We feel first then we think. And that means we have to create processes that elicit people’s true feelings on a topic. One thing we are always searching for is how people want to feel vs. how they do feel. This gap drives potent strategies. For example, we worked with an automotive service brand that strongly promoted price and convenience. We learned from our emotionally based research that people didn’t use the brand because the experience left them feeling stupid and taken advantage of (which is a category experience); they want to feel confident and in control. Understanding this emotional gap led us a marketing strategy that emphasized how we address service program attributes that make people feel confident and in control. An obvious approach, perhaps, but one that is not often used.
2) Prepare participants for the experience they’ll have together. A prepared participant takes a stand, engages in deeper dialogue, is less superficial and swayed by others. Prepared participants explore your issue at home (where real decision-making takes place). We ask participants to do any number of activities before they come to talk with us; they might prepare collages, maintain diaries, visit stores and take pictures. In the groups, we begin by sharing the homework. As a result, participants can engage in more lively debate with others and you can observe significant similarities and differences that you know are less a product of group think and more a product of what is real. For a recent project relating to cell service providers, we ask participants to prepare collages that represent how they feel about their cell provider vs how they want to feel. Then, we they responded to various advertising campaigns, they could compare the campaign messaging to their ideal vs. current feelings. The result was a tremendously successful advertising campaign.
3) As the client, be less prepared. This sounds like a heretical directive, but in the heresy lies real value. Less preparation gives you more opportunity to be surprised. Surprise leads to new insights, which we believe is the goal of any research (because why spend the money if you already know the answer.) Yes, it’s important to have an agenda, to know what you want feedback on. But going in with a series of very specific questions or multiple concepts that are different in minor ways means you only get answers to those questions – and not what’s really on the mind of your participants. Instead, we encourage clients to prepare stimulus that allow participants to “co-create” solutions. For example, if you are in a concept development stage, deconstruct your concepts into small nuggets and present those nuggets to participants with a group of emotions you want to generate and pictures and let them construct the concept. In other words, you prepare the stimulus, participants put them together in a way that adds meaning and relevance to them. The emerging concepts will be less about you and more about your customers/potential customers, which is, after all, the goal of marketing.
4) Use more activities, less discussion. Language comes from our left (rationalizing) brain. If you want to understand how people feel as well as how they think, you have to give them activities that unleash what’s in their right brains. That means activities based on images, drawing, even music, that allows them to express the more intuitive ideas and reactions that motivate behavior. It’s a pretty basic idea. And it works. In a recent workshop, we asked showed a piece of ethnography video a group of professionals. We asked one group to write their insights and the other group to draw their insights. The differences between the two were astonishing (yes, the drawings went deeper, faster.)
5) Experiment, experiment, experiment. If new insights and ideas is your goal, then you have to keep yourself fresh and open. Doing things the same way, all or even most of the time, leads to the same results. If you are looking for new (and better), then try new approaches. If they fail, move on. If they work, congratulations on your courage and your new ideas!
The bottom line: a research event is a moment in time. A great new insight can drive business success. If it’s insights you are looking for, then try some of these ideas. If you want help with the process, call us!
