Did you even look at that data afterwards?

In my 15 years in marketing, I've seen a lot of focus groups.  I've had to recruit for them, write briefs for them, conduct them, spend hours watching them, and, not infrequently, try to prevent the client from getting drunk while watching them.  (If you've ever been behind the one-way glass yourself, you know that by the last focus group at 8pm, it's a miracle if the whole panel isn't totally loaded through sheer boredom.)

Here is what I've learned:

• 99% of the time, focus groups are a waste of money

Oh, I know - you're thinking I'm a Luddite, or I just didn't do them right, or I didn't ask the right questions, or something.

Here's why I know I'm right:

• In all my years - as a junior ad agency type who had no control over the process or outcome, and as a senior advertising type who supposedly ran the whole thing - I have never seen a focus group overturn whatever preconceived notions the team had before the whole grisly business
• When a focus group 'insight' does get used, it's in exactly the way it wasn't supposed to be:  as an anecdotal piece of evidence.  "Remember that woman in the focus group who kept saying that she'd never buy cereal in a red box?  That's why we definitely have to repackage."
• I have never met a roomful of people more judgemental and dismissive than a bunch of agency types and their client watching a group of people who aren't like them
• There's nothing you can learn from $50,000 worth of focus groups that you couldn't learn by just going out on the street and asking a variety of people what they think of your product.

The act of observing changes the observed

In the real world, people who don't work in marketing don't think about your marketing concept or your packaging or your Big Idea for more than 5 seconds at a time, and they definitely don't spend much time analyzing their 'feelings' about what they buy.  

Asking them to read a couple of blurbs about your product, then spending 30 minutes discussing their reactions to those blurbs, may give you insight into their reading comprehension and imagination, but it won't get you even close to an objective assessment of the potential success of your concept.  

(Want proof?  Show a roomful of people a written explanation of 3 concepts, and ask for their thoughts.  Then show them the advertisements that resulted from those concepts and ask them again.  I promise you that their responses won't be remotely the same.)

The one benefit of focus groups

With only minor exceptions, people who work in marketing are shockingly homogeneous.  We dress the same, listen to the same music, have the same worldviews, and are united in our tacit assumption that anyone who doesn't work in advertising is significantly less cool (and successful) than we are.  We tend to forget that our purchasing decisions aren't, in fact, indicative of the rest of the world's.

Focus groups are a handy reminder that, in fact, there are all kinds of different people out there.  You know, people who manage to get through the day without loving sushi, knowing who Seth Godin is, or wondering when Tindersticks is going to put out a new album.  And while focus groups aren't going to give you that Killer Insight that will totally transform the way you advertise your product, they may just remind you that the people buying most of that product don't look (or act) like you.

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