Don't like the answers? Ask different questions

Focus groups have become the marketing equivalent of bankers: everyone slags them off, and yet they’re still dominant in our world. Why? I think the problem is the abuse of focus groups, not the focus group itself. The behavioural economics brigade have countless examples of how people can neither explain their past behaviour nor predict their future actions. They use this to decry the use of focus groups, and many other forms of market research, as being utterly pointless. There’s some truth in this but it’s by no means the end of market research, nor even of focus groups.

Better directions

Much so-called market research is what I class as “directed” research – where we direct the respondents to answer our questions, generally requiring them to be rational, in order to help us make decisions. Which pack do you prefer? Which of these TV advertisements do you remember? What do you think about when choosing a toothpaste? (“Not much” is the truthful answer to that last one, but as a respondent you don’t earn your £50, plus wine and crisps, for turning up with nothing to say.) That’s the stuff that the behavioural economists rightly attack. Force me to think rationally and slowly about something I normally do instinctively and quickly, and you’ll probably get a different answer.

This has been demonstrated in quantitative research. In a study of different pack designs, the 'winning pack' during conventional research, where the respondents could take a minute or two to consider the options, was a loser when the respondents had to choose quickly. This second situation is more like real shopping of course, even if people can’t tell us why they made the choices they did. But straightaway you can see one great use of market research: to simulate a market situation so that decisions can be made earlier and with reduced risk of getting it wrong.

Simulate the market

Choice architecture is another favourite of the behavioural economists. Offer two bottles of wine at, say £5.99 and £7.99, and the cheaper one will be chosen by 70% of people. Add a third bottle at a premium, say £14.99, and the balance shifts to something like 30/50/20. Suddenly you’re selling a lot more of the £7.99 bottle, almost double in fact, just by introducing another option that’s more expensive. Of course people can’t predict this directly in focus groups. So how do we know it? Market research, of course. It’s called market research not focus group research for a reason. If you want to know about what might happen in a market, you need to simulate the market.

Reducing risk

This brings us to the dominant driver for much of the market research conducted on behalf of businesses. Ostensibly it’s to help make choices in the business, but mainly it’s to reduce risk in their decision-making. Despite the evidence that badly designed, or poorly conducted, market research can be misleading, many people use it as justification for decisions. That’s fine in some cases, but we shouldn’t expect other people to answer the questions that we in the business care about.  For meaningful responses, we need to explore the stuff they are interested in, not the stuff we want to be able to present to the board. Let’s be honest, a lot of the time it’s delegating our decision making to our customers. Or less kindly, arse-covering. This is a selfish way to use respondents. We shouldn’t expect them to do our work for us, and that includes making decisions.  

So are focus groups good for anything? Absolutely, yes. The top business requirement is to be curious about what people value and how to make things better, because that’s what they pay for. I wrote about this in a recent post (“Getting customers to do it your way”) illustrating how approaching customers in a genuine spirit of enquiry is usually more productive than using research to find out how to get them to do what you want. There’s lots of talk about businesses becoming customer-centric. How about being customer-centric in market research too?