It's become popular to disparage focus groups -- even smart people I like and admire are doing it (like author Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, for instance). What people often hear is that research is bad, or people who rely on it are lacking in leadership ability. Most of the people making these disparaging comments about marketing research are also usually trumpeting the importance of getting close to your customer.
So if getting close to your customers is a good thing, what's wrong with focus groups as a method?
The focus group is only one method
Focus groups are only one method. And there's a fair bit of encrustation around the business, what with dedicated facilities, specialized recruiting firms, etc. etc. But they do have their uses, and they are relatively fast and relatively cheap compared to some other methods.
The leaders in customer experience use a lot of other methods. Check out this list in Designing a Better Customer Experience, from BusinessWeek Online, that summarizes IDEO's approach.
- Shadowing
- Behavioral mapping
- Consumer journey
- Camera journals
- Extreme user interviews,
- Storytelling
- Unfocus groups
These are all qualitative methods, and a good researcher could add to this list of methods.
There's a lot of bad research out there
Running a focus group looks like just about the easiest thing in the world to do. Here are the kinds of problems you'll see when someone doesn't know what they are doing:
- It sounds like a serial interview
- There's a lot of voting and consensus building going on
- The people in the discussion are talking to the moderator, not to each other
I could go on, but you get the idea. A much bigger issue, and probably the real reason it's suddenly cool to trash focus group is too much reliance on consumers to do management's thinking for them.
Don't expect the consumers to design your next product or make the decision for you
People are experts on their own lives and experiences, not on new product development. They can tell you how they clean the grout between the bathroom tiles, or show you how, or communicate many other aspects of that experience. But it's up to the company to take that learning and do something with it, a la Clorox Bleach Pen.
The right use of qualitative research is to learn a lot more about your customers' lives and problems. What do they love about their job, their home, their hobby? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly? What happens before, during and after using your product? What are their goals and their problems?
Learning these things will help you figure out ways to innovate and create competitive advantage. You might even be able to do some product testing (although this can be fraught with peril, and you need to know the pitfalls).
But you're starting onto thin ice if you want a group of average folks to come up with a market-leading product innovation in two hours in a focus group room, when your own product development team is stumped.
Four things that work to understand customer experience
If you want to understand your customer's experience, you can basically do four things.
- You can have the experience yourself. Try calling the call centre with a problem. Install the software. Eat the pudding. Wear the deodorant. You get the idea. While you're at it, why not try out the competitor experience too?
- You can hear about the experience. These are the traditional methods of interviewing and focus group discussion. But who says they had to happen in a focus group room? How about having the conversation in the Starbucks? How about sitting at the table with the customers. How about doing it in an online bulletin board, or using an online video meeting? And how about trying some more creative methods, like story-telling or collage? People are even doing hypnosis now.
- You can observe the experience. Get out there and watch what's happening. Go into the branch on a Saturday and see how it's different than on a Tuesday. Sit in the waiting area for a couple of hours. Watch what people are doing. Job shadow a customer service officer (and yes, it's okay to talk to them too)
- You can measure the experience. How long are people on hold? What time do they call? How long does it take to process the paperwork? Get some hard data to support the rest of the research, and compare to the perceptual information.
But please don't trash the focus group, which has been a loyal servant for decades. Just don't ask it to play every position on the team.
Acknowledgements
To smart cookie and awesome researcher Lisa Elder, who created the categories in the list above for a presentation we made to QRCA.
