Focus groups

That moment when you think, “your sister’s boyfriend’s brother is not our demographic”.

We can all count the number of times we’ve heard things like “the CEO’s wife doesn’t like the concept”, as you quietly mutter to yourself, “but our audience is Gen Alpha”.

So, is “test-running” your idea by your prime customer group a good idea?

Let’s take a look at the focus group.

Focus groups don’t work!

Let’s face it – people prefer Pepsi to Coke. Blind tests have shown this. So why do people default to saying that Coke is their favourite?

One experiment showed brain scans as people drank Pepsi and Coke – their preference was Pepsi – however, when they tried the drinks with the logos attached – the scans showed a preference for Coke (Sarabyn, n.d.).

PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay love to use neuroscience. In one such experiment, when they were developing a campaign for Cheetos, consumers told them that the only thing they didn’t like about Cheetos was the “gross and messy” orange stuff that sticks to your fingers. However, brain scans showed the pleasure zones were activated when consumers saw this on other people’s fingers. They built a campaign around this, and Cheetos sales spiked by something like 47 million dollars (Sarabyn, n.d.).

On top of this, multiple organisations have fallen foul of a focus group  – NBC, New Coke, MacDonald’s Arch Deluxe, 3DTV [1]…

Why don’t focus groups work?

A straightforward explanation is that we have a perceived version of ourselves – so our responses are influenced by how we want others to see us. Although our survival brain will give an immediate internal reaction, our logical brain will kick in and say out loud what we think sounds acceptable.

The environment moulds how we want to be perceived. In a group of “like-minded” people, a group member will envisage their own persona based on their stature within that group rather than on their raw desires. In the focus group, we change our persona to fit the others around us.

In a study based at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, researchers found that people had different honesty levels when in individual and group situations  (Kocher et al., 2017).

In his book Unconscious branding, Douglas Van Praet (2012) talks about one experience he had with a focus group:

“Once, when I was conducting focus groups, I asked a cross section of cost-conscious compact sedan owners who had just seen the redesigned Jetta, ‘What would your friends think of you if they saw you driving this new car?’ They responded defiantly, saying things like, ‘I don’t care what others think of me, I just want to get from point A to Point B!’ Shortly thereafter, these same panelists were shown several concepts to describe the new Jetta and asked which they preferred. ‘I like Head-Turning Good Looks!’ they concurred.” (Van Praet, 2012, p. 9)

Focus groups DO work?

The more you look at it – the more it becomes evident that focus groups are a thing of the past. I mean, what have focus groups ever done for anyone?

The Barbie Doll, Chrysler, Domino’s pizza, Obama, Twitter, Starbucks, Disney, Betty Crocker’s Cake Mix (2) … With the help of focus groups, each of these brands/ideas became the successes they are.

Barbie looks like she does because of a focus group. Chrysler’s Plymouth was successful because, during a focus group, it appeared that wives influenced their husbands when buying a car. Obama’s media team ran over 500 ads past a focus group before he was successfully re-elected in 2012.

Ok, so focus groups DO work?

Although the Coke/Pepsi experiment didn’t quite work, scanning the brain is one way to bypass the persona. Companies like Yahoo, Mercedes-Daimler and Hyundai rely on incorporating electroencephalogram (EEG) readings into their feedback.

In 2009, Yahoo, for example, ran a 60-second advert past people rigged up to an EEG before they invested in airing the advert. The results showed that the areas of the brain associated with memory and emotion (limbic system and frontal cortices) were stimulated, so they ran the advert (NeuroRelay, 2012).

The campaign worked (to some degree). The time spent on the homepage went up by 7% (Bhatnaturally, 2009).

But even the EEG isn’t an exact science – since the launch of Yahoo’s campaign, the number of unique visits dropped by 11.4% (Cassidy, 2010), and the brand value was reported to have dropped by 11% (Swisher, 2011).

A focus group can identify a problem, but they need the insight to predict the future and, thus, the best solution.

As Steve Jobs famously said: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” (cited in Ciotti, 2014).

Focus groups do work – but there’s a catch …

American psychologist and marketer Ernest Dichter and his Institute for Motivational Research used focus groups. He was responsible for multiple successes, from The Barbie Doll to “Tiger in your tank” to Ivory soap to Chrysler Plymouth. Although he listened to focus groups, he then used the information to find a solution:

So … DO focus groups work?!!

Whether face-to-face or through an EEG, everyone’s feedback is valuable (even if it’s someone’s girlfriend’s boyfriend studying his GCSEs – true story). Dichter and Jobs focused on the solution first and then took a risk. Our role is to make informed decisions by collecting as much data and as many emotional responses as possible. However, we also have the responsibility to take this feedback and then use our “third ear” to create something that works.

The Takeaway

I’m constantly reminded of Juan Cabral pitching the advert idea to Cadbury’s of a Gorilla playing drums with no reference to chocolate whatsoever. On paper, the idea is crazy. Would a focus group have supported it? It’s well documented that Cadbury’s didn’t like the advert (Caird, 2016). If it wasn’t for the persistence of Phil Rumbol (director of marketing at Fallon London), then it would never have aired. And yet it still holds as one of the most memorable adverts of our time.