| Typically, we try to prevent respondents
from trying to convince each other that they’re right. We try to neutralize the
"group dynamic." As we explain to them, in the "real world," people
don’t spend an hour and a half in a focus group discussing the product. And we want
to know what their opinions were before they came into the focus group room. However, there are some situations where the opposite is true. When
a client is developing marketing communications for an existing product or service, they
want to know what points will sway their potential customers. What are the arguments we
need to make that will cause the prospect to say "why didn’t you say so? Now
that I know that, of course I’m interested."
In these situations, we put together focus groups with a
mix of enthusiastic current customers and non-customers. And we have the enthusiasts
persuade the non-customers. Not only do we learn what elements convince the prospects, we
also see what questions they ask – what are their areas of concern. These groups
invariably yield rich results.
And by the way, the same technique works as a method to
help weaker salespeople. Conduct groups with weaker salespeople together with a few star
salespeople, and let the stars tell the others how they did it.
Other anecdotes:
"Talk
to the employees. But don’t tell me that they need to be paid more money."
Clarifying objectives with clients
"That
sounds like it came from the Iraqi Ministry of Information!"
Dealing with difficult respondents
"But
if the software goes down, my whole business would be paralyzed."
Category knowledge helps obtain additional insights
"I
want to know what people think of our website – both how it works and also the
overall concept."
We came up with a hybrid methodology for more effective website
research |