12 Jun
Unfocus Groups
A light posting week, as I am in the Middle East for a while with spotty Internet access. While waiting in the Emirates Lounge at JFK to catch my fight to Dubai, I happened to catch Frank Luntz on Fox News with the results of a “Focus Group” on the presidential election. What I saw was horrifying, at least to me. You see, I love focus groups—love great qualitative research of all kinds, and don’t think companies do nearly enough—but what I saw on the ole’ Emirates big screen was hardly a focus group. Luntz had 25-30 people sitting on some kind of bleacher seats, basically raising their hands and answering questions. It might have been better described as a Town Hall Meeting, or really, just serial interviews. I hate it when friends and family see that sort of thing and ask me, “Hey, is that all you do?”
Great focus groups should have fewer than a dozen people (I generally work with 8, as a matter of taste), and should at the very least facilitate some sort of conversation amongst the respondents, which is hard to do when they are all jammed onto bleachers. Now, Luntz may have just called this a “focus group” as a matter of convenience (I hope!) but I can guarantee that there was absolutely nothing learned from that session that couldn’t have been obtained cheaper and more robustly with a 10-minute telephone interview. Besides the fact that it is impossible to properly moderate two dozen people, it can hardly be a comfortable, conversation-facilitating experience to be jammed onto four rows of bleachers, unable to see each other, waiting to get “called on” like you were back in grade school.
Great focus groups are like little ecosystems, with body language, speech patterns and inter-respondent interaction every bit as important as the “answers” themselves. Often it is the flinch, the hesitance and the easily-missed grimace that can start the most productive lines of inquiry in a focus group.
Bleacher seats. Where were the gigantic foam hands with “Fox News #1!!”?
Cranky DataSnob OUT.
