Pi-Consulting

One of the subtlest ways of probing consumer wants, needs, attitudes and values is the focus group. This is typically a discussion group of 5-10 carefully chosen respondents, hand-picked to represent the users — or prospective users — of a particular product. The meeting is guided by a moderator, who takes the group through a series of prepared questions, and asks them to elaborate on their answers more fully. The result can be an illuminating insight not only into past and present attitudes to products, but also open-ended reactions to future or planned product introductions. “What-if” scenarios can be explored. The responses can be qualitatively very rich, including sometimes revealing verbatim comments.
The limitation of focus groups as a way of assessing general consumer attitudes is, first, the small size if the group. However carefully the respondents are chosen, the results of the study have almost no statistical significance. A finding cannot be reliably projected from ten people to a market of tens or hundreds of thousands. The technique also depends on the questions being asked — are they open-ended or in some way likely to “lead” the respondents — and on the quality and skill of the moderator. He/she has to guard against responses which represent what the respondent thinks the moderator wants to hear. There is also the danger of a group session being dominated by one or two forceful respondents, with others in the group suppressing their true views and going along with what they see as the prevailing view. It is worth noting that numerous product launch ideas which seem to perform well in focus-group sessions go on to fail in the marketplace.