Client Guide to the Focus Group

This is an advanced guide to the rationale behind focus groups and how to use them best. It will tell you how focus groups differ psychologically from individual interviews, and how to take advantage of these differences. It will also help you understand the different uses of focus groups and the uses to avoid. [Back to home page]

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This is badly needed. The focus group seems to have cycles of popularity. In the last 30 years, the focus group has gone from a controversial method, to high acceptance in certain industries, then fallen out of favor, and is now enjoying a resurgence that probably makes it the fastest growing research methodology. It is often abused, misused and overused in some of its more common uses. Yet, it is unused or underused for some of its most valuable applications. There are Fortune 100 companies that do not run focus groups, and others that conduct several a day. Some companies swear at them, others swear by them. These differences are more a matter of approach to research, rather than the applicability of focus group methodology to their particular products and customers. Most of what has been written about the focus group is introductory in nature. Simple introductory articles and books are important, but it is now time to move beyond the nuts and bolts into how to best operate the machinery.

There is a widespread - though mistaken - belief that focus groups are the easiest to understand, execute and interpret of all research methodologies. After all, a focus group is just a bunch of people reacting to a concept or discussing a subject. You don't even have to know exactly what questions to ask. You certainly don't need a tight questionnaire. Any friendly person can get a group of people together, ask questions and the conversation flows. What's to interpret? You just listen to what the participants are saying and generalize them to the population. Granted, very few people would actually agree with the statements in this paragraph. But too many act as if they do. The truth is that focus groups require a considerable amount of professional discipline in their design, execution and interpretation. Their flexibility and adaptability is mistaken for looseness or casualness. It is the superficial and intentional resemblance of focus groups to simple group discussions that often causes them to be mistaken for simple group discussions. A focus group is no more a simple group discussion than a group therapy session is a simple group discussion. Both look superficially like simple group discussions, but they have much more ambitious objectives and require considerably more from the group leader. I've conducted both; focus groups are more difficult to lead. In focus groups, there are extraordinary pressures to accomplish specific objectives within extreme time constraints. In order to properly conduct focus groups, years of training and experience are needed not only in traditional psychology, but also in the separate fields of sociology, group dynamics and business (including marketing, sales and distribution).

In an individual depth interview, the respondent is relating to one person, the interviewer. The clear advantage, in some cases, is that responses are not "contaminated" by other reactions. This lack of contamination is desirable in some situations, since a very skillful interviewer can get the respondent into great depth without distractions, and without having people change or withhold their opinions when they hear what other people have to say. That's the theory. Often, however, the respondent simply runs out of steam. The interviewer is sure there is more, but skillful probing simply fails to elicit it. With each succeeding respondent, the interviewer tries to get into greater depth or breadth, but often the responses are all variations on the same theme. More interviews give greater statistical reliability ­ you can be increasingly confident that people will say the same thing ­ but often you don't learn anything more after the first few interviews.

Each respondent now has eight other people to relate to ­ seven other participants plus the moderator. (A relationship includes all of the expectations, communication, beliefs, evaluations and emotions that people have toward each other.) What happens? Instead of two relationships in the interview ­ that of the interviewer to the respondent and that of the respondent to the interviewer ­ we now have 8 X 9 = 72, plus all of the subgroup relationships! People cannot handle 72+ relationships at the same time separately. They have to organize them. What is important is that the way people handle these relationships reflects what they do in real life and now becomes an important part of the information we are collecting.

... and dozens of other roles, usually several at the same time. Roles are primarily a group phenomenon. Why is this so important? It is the interaction between the different types of people, in their various roles, which brings out the most useful information: A marketer needs to hear where there is consensus among these different types of people, and where there is a diversity of experience and opinion. You want to hear not only opinions, but also the kinds of people who hold these opinions, how the opinions are expressed and what values are at the root of them. You also want to hear how these different types of people react to what is said. For instance: How does the leader lead? How does the dominator attempt to dominate? How does the distracter distract? What grabs the innovator, what are the defenses of the laggard? What is persuasive and to whom? What segments will first buy the product, even when the other types of people are trying to dissuade him or her? Observing people interacting in these roles allows you to know what they can all agree on, and what differences need to be addressed in your marketing.

Stimulation

As you move from individual interviews to groups, people not only revert to type by interacting in their diverse roles, they stimulate each other. By stimulation, I mean more than just interaction. The value of focus groups is not only that people can react to each others' comments (interaction), but in so doing, they potentiate each other (stimulation) ­ the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Stimulation is created by the excitement, group support, challenge, new ideas and other features of the interaction. It can provide strategic advantages that often mean the difference between the success or failure of a product.

There is an almost irresistible pull to say things that they would ordinarily not reveal. They:

	react to each others' comments
	draw each other out
	ask each other questions you didn't think to ask
	build on each others' ideas
	spark new ideas
	jog each others' memories
	modify each others' comments
	fill in incompletions and gaps in knowledge
	nudge each other out of ruts and habitual thinking.
	take opposing positions
	persuade each other
	change their opinions

As a result of stimulation, you get more information from the group than you could possibly get from any amount of questioning of individuals, even in situations where the purchase decision is itself an individual one.

Flexibility

Focus groups, more than any other method, allow for the emergence and pursuit of surprise information. Agendas can be modified from group to group, and even within groups. A good moderator can build upon the ideas and insights of previous groups, getting to a greater depth of understanding.

Putting it all together

In summary, focus groups uniquely expose and accentuate both the similarities and the differences between distinct types of people. By seeing how these different types of people interact, you get a completeness of information that can be achieved in no other way. Focus groups spark more new ideas and identify more unexpected information than any other method of marketing research.

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	Open-Ended Interaction
	Strong emergence of roles
	Stimulation
	Flexibility

Let's now look at the kinds of problems that can best be solved by a methodology with these unique characteristics.

Given these characteristics, focus groups are best for:

	Exploration ("Fishing Expedition")
	Investigation (Detective Work)
	Identification of Present Practices
	Understanding Motivations
	New Idea Generation
	Communication Refinement
	Persuasion Design Labs
	Strategic Positioning
	Word of Mouth Research

Exploration: (The "Fishing Expedition")

Often, you are facing a situation where you literally don't know the language to use or the questions to ask. This can be when you are exploring a new market, going to a new population, or entering a new area of technology. When you are exploring new territory, you don't know what you will find. Focus groups allow you the flexibility to "go with the flow" to uncover hidden information. This is why focus groups are so useful in quantitative research design for tightening up the concepts, issues and questions.

Examples of actual research problems:

	What are the present satisfactions and dissatisfactions with our product and those of our competition?
	Find out for us what are the deepest fears of the anesthesiologist and what words they use to express them.
	See how blue collar workers feel about shaving.
	See what complaints and dissatisfactions arise when groups of car owners "bitch" about their cars.
	Generate a long list of minor improvements which would make our product seem different.
	Identify what themes arise these days among hospital administrators spontaneously discussing their jobs.

Unfortunately, this use of focus groups is often considered a luxury. "We don't have time for that sort of research with our specific pressing problems, and we're in touch with our customers anyway." However, what your customers and prospects are telling each other may not be what they are telling you. Also, dissatisfactions and needs may be deeply buried, requiring skilled probing to uncover.

Investigation: ("Detective Work")

In contrast to exploration, where you are looking for anything of value and don't know specifically what you are looking for, in detective work you know the characteristics of what you are looking for, but you don't know who the "culprit" is. You are looking for the answer to a particular question, an explanation for a particular phenomenon. The answer is already out there, but you have to find it. The use of the investigational focus group is particularly powerful in situations where each person only has a piece of the puzzle. When you put them together, the whole picture emerges. Such situations may involve multiple decision makers, different members of a team, complex professional relationships, or distributor, dealer, salesperson, customer relationships. In contrast to the pre-questionnaire use of the exploratory focus group, investigational focus groups are useful after quantitative studies to help explain the anomalies that inevitably turn up.

Examples of actual research problems:

How do the hospital administrators, head of the department, practicing physicians, nurses, therapists, members of certain committees all interact in order to decide to put a particular machine in the hospital, or adopt a particular drug? Our sales curve is going up. Find out if it is made up of satisfied customers or if there are growing dissatisfactions that will make the bottom drop out. Why are our sales not going down when the competition's sales are going up and the market is not expanding? Our competition is saying something that is sabotaging our sales. What are they really saying? Our sales people are not getting the story across. What are they actually saying and doing? Focus groups allow you the flexibility to follow the twists and turns, hunches and clues of an investigation, while creating the psychological environment in which people are open with each other, even though they aren't with you.

Identification of Present Practices

Often, how people are using a product is quite different than they will reveal to an outsider. Or, the details of their usage is difficult, boring or too elementary to talk about to an outsider. However, people will get into the most amazing detail with other people who are in the same shoes, who speak the same language, who they expect to understand them. Too many product managers think they understand how their product is being used (often they used it when they were in the market), and they miss many opportunities to fill shifting needs.

Examples of actual research problems:

How is our product being used vs. that of the competitors'?

Our drug is not being used in an FDA approved manner. How are physicians really using it, and what are the causes of this usage? Discover any new uses of our product which we can use to expand our market. When someone drops our product, usually they are asked for their reasons. But no one will say, "I used it incorrectly, inappropriately and stupidly." They say, "It didn't work." Analyze the usage of ex-users to determine whether there is a problem that is correctable (by changing the product, changing people's expectations, or training people in better use).

Understanding Motivation

Understanding people's motivations is the second most difficult assignment in marketing, in fact in all of psychology. Getting people to change is the first. But in order to get people to change, to buy your product, to give up old ways of doing things, you have to understand their motivations.

Several things make understanding motivation extremely difficult:

	People often do not understand why they are doing the things they are doing, and therefore can't tell you.
	Even when they do understand why they are doing things, they don't want to tell you.
	When they do tell you, they often don't tell you the truth, or the whole truth. Or, they tell you more than the truth.
	It is more important for most people to preserve their view of themselves than tell you why they are doing what they are doing.
	There is rarely a single reason why a given person does something. Any simple, single act of behavior is usually the result of many complex forces from inside and outside the individual.
	The same act of behavior can be motivated by different things in different people. Members of the same group, performing the same task at the same time may have vastly different motivations.
	The same person will do the same thing at different times for different motivations.
	Some motivations, even if you find them out, are often irrelevant to marketing, in that you can do little, if anything, about them. These may involve motivations based upon deep fears, pathology or illegal activities.
	Yet motivations are extremely important for the marketer to understand, particularly those centering around fundamental beliefs, values, tastes and emotions.

The best way to find out about motivation is by inferring the causes of behavior from people's thoughts and actions. The worst way, often, is to ask them, "Why did you do it?" The best way to get into people's thoughts and actions is to have them talk, in an atmosphere of psychological safety, about what they do ­ not why they do it ­ and how they feel about what they do. When enough descriptions about enough behavior are put together, patterns begin to emerge. The people you are trying to understand are often unaware of these patterns. You then test these patterns against other, similar people to adjust your message. The best laboratory for this is the focus group. People get caught up in the spirit of the group, particularly when they discover people who are simpatico. These other people quickly cease to be strangers, yet they aren't friends, family or co-workers. They begin to pour out information, opinions and feelings that they would not ordinarily share with most other people. The focus group is the only setting available to the marketer for finding out deep motivations which can then be used to fulfill people's deepest needs. Provided, of course, that the moderator is a superb psychologist (academic training is unimportant, competence comes from many sources).

Examples of actual research problems:

	Why do people buy our product?
	Why do people take so long to adopt our product?
	What are people's unfulfilled desires and needs?
	What are people's real concerns as distinct from all the concerns that we can imagine.
	We make a claim. People buy our product. Are they buying the product in response to our promise, despite our promise, or for some other reasons?
	What will motivate someone to read our ad, read our other promotional material, listen to our salespeople?
	How can we get people to try our product?

New Idea Generation

This is the most valuable and least used use of the focus group. In most marketing research assignments, you are trying to find something that is, rather than create something that isn't. In new idea generation, you are trying to discover or create new ideas: products, services, themes, explanations, thoughts, images, and metaphors. Some people believe that this is best left up to the "creative types." I believe that new idea generation is not only within the bounds of marketing research, but at the very heart of it. I do not believe that the primary mission of marketing research is to find out what is going on in the marketplace and stop there. Finding out about the present situation is not the end point, it is the beginning. What can be done about the present situation is much more important. I not only want to find out what is, but what can be. It is artificial and dangerous to separate fact finding from creativity. They are different processes, but they interact so strongly that they should not be separated. In a group, someone expresses a desire, someone else reacts with a wish, someone else suggests a way to do it, someone else modifies it to be more practical, the whole groups yells, "Yeah, that's it!" That's marketing research at it's best.

Examples of actual research problems:

Develop new features for our next product. Develop advertising themes which will create a high degree of interest in our products. Find a new positioning for our product which will increase our market share. Generate new product ideas. We have pharmaceutical products. We can't easily modify our drugs, and new drugs are discovered in the laboratory, not the focus group. Find us ways to get the physician interested in our drug, new educational material which will be well received, new delivery systems.
Sometimes seemingly trivial changes can make a dramatic difference: discovering the hidden benefit of a tablet instead of a capsule made one drug a market leader; discovering the need for a book on a subject which was neglected, then producing it, made a drug's sales take off.

Communication Refinement

From a marketing perspective, what you actually say is not as important as what people think you say, and what people think of what they think you said. In other words, communication has more to do with what is received and accepted than what is actually meant. There is a "Murphy's Law" of communication which says that if there is any possible way for people to misunderstand you, they will ­ and in the most damaging possible way. It is crucially important to understand how your communication is received. This is usually attempted by various recall measures. However, this is a very primitive method. In the real world, people think about what you are selling, and talk it over with other people. A much better way is to show people ads, promotional material, or even give them a sales presentation in a series of focus groups. You can get a much deeper idea of exactly what ideas are getting across and how people are reacting to them.

Examples of actual research problems:

What is the best way to explain our concept? What are our ads, promotional material, salespeople actually communicating? Why do so many people think our tablet is supposed to be dissolved in water when it is supposed to be swallowed whole? (In this case, the salespeople were demonstrating dispersion in the stomach by dissolving the tablet in water). Why are the Japanese offended by our ad showing an octopus using our deodorant under his arms? (Because the Japanese view the appendages of the octopus as legs!)

Persuasion Design Laboratories

Focus groups provide an extraordinary way for you to hear people as they are actually deliberating about a purchase. You can provide them with promotional material, even invite a salesperson to give a presentation, then have the group discuss what they are persuaded by and what they reject. As they bring up objections and points in support of your product, you can introduce other materials for further reaction. As you go through a series of groups, you can refine the persuasion strategy by finding out the best order in which to present material, what is needed as proof of claims, what answers to objections actually work (or undercut the objections before they even come up), and what actually closes a sale.

Examples of actual research problems:

Tell us which of our ads, sales and promotional materials are working, which are not, and which ones need to be developed. Circa 1971: Automated Teller Machines (ATM's) ­ which in those days were called Cash Machines ­ are sure to cause many objections. Empirically develop and test ways to undercut and/or answer the objections. Our competition is using scientific studies in an inaccurate and unethical way to bolster their position, when in fact the studies show the opposite of what they are claiming. If physicians understood the complex data, they would be outraged, and our competition's tactics would backfire. Find out how to accomplish this. This is the hardest type of group to conduct, since it requires on the part of the moderator a research orientation, an experimental disposition, a creative attitude and a high degree of persuasive skill, all at the same time. For many people, these skills are incompatible.

Strategic Positioning

The flexibility and creative stimulation of focus groups makes them superb both for developing positionings for products, as well as testing and refining positionings which have already been developed.

Examples of actual research problems:

Where do I fit into the rest of the products in my category? How can I redefine my product to get greater market share? How do I describe my totally unique product?

Concept Development

New concepts are not born fully grown. They must be nurtured and pruned. The focus group is the most fertile ground for growing and modifying new concepts. See my paper, Concept "Testing" in Focus Groups for more details.

Word of mouth research

Word of mouth is the most powerful force in the marketplace. In many industries and with many products it is more powerful than advertising, salespeople and promotional materials put together. In fact, it is of overriding importance in virtually any field where it is difficult, risky or expensive to try a product. It is notoriously important in fields like medicine (among physicians), automobiles, entertainment (movies, TV and books), consumer products, agricultural products and industrial products. Yet, marketers and marketing researchers neglect word of mouth to an appalling degree, probably because they don't think that they can do anything to research it reliably, or ultimately do anything about it. There is an amazing amount of indifference to word of mouth, and resignation toward it. Yet, I know of no other research that is easier. Again, the focus group is the answer. Here again, the unique characteristics of the focus group (open ended interaction, stimulation, emergence of roles and flexibility) make it superb for researching word of mouth and even for learning how to influence it. All you have to do is to put several people who are using your ­ or your competitor's ­ product together in a group with interested non users. The non-users are asked to find out about the product from the users. This requires very little moderating skill, especially in the first session or two. In fact, the least moderating the better. You want to sit back and listen. You can even "leave" such groups for a while, and observe from behind the one way mirror with your clients. However, while you don't need to be a good moderator for such sessions, you had better be a superb listener and analyst. You have to listen for what is behind the questions and concerns, what is credible and persuasive, and what motivates people to try, buy and praise the product to others. You need to figure out what is fundamental, and what is superficial. So much information is generated from such research that you end up with an embarrassment of riches which will take a great deal of analytical and marketing skill to sort out.

Examples of actual research problems:

Who influences the purchase decision, and how? What are our customers saying about our product and our competitors' products? What are recent triers telling their friends? What are our dissatisfied ex-customers saying? What concepts and words are people using to describe our product? What would most strongly influence word of mouth to turn in our favor?

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	Verbalizations ­ what they are saying
	Meanings ­ what they actually mean
	Language
	Vocabulary, jargon
	Level
	Empathic Quotes
	Classes, concepts, categories
	Degree of formality
	Non-verbals
	Omissions, what people are not saying
	Abstractions
	New concepts
	Examples, stories
	Contradictions ­ e.g. between thoughts and feelings, statements and examples Explanations ­ yours and theirs
	Hypotheses
	Implications
	Generalizations and Principles
	Values
	Fundamental beliefs
	Relationships ­ interpersonal, conceptual, logical, emotional, cause and effect,
	Emotional reactions, particularly:
	Enthusiasm, joy, excitement, perking up of interest
	Low energy
	Anger
	Fear
	Curiosity
	Changes in emotional tone
	Patterns ­ intellectual, emotional, behavioral, intergroup, intragroup, cause and effect, between roles
	Roles and what people do with them
	Degree of consensus, agreement
	Different points of view
	Evaluative criteria
	Influence patterns
	Opinion Shifts
	Persuasion flow

Wow! All this to keep track of and you want instant interpretations too?