Category — In Defence of Focus Groups

What now?

Times are indeed getting tougher and likely to lead to a changed world in many ways.

Who will you become?

How will you get there?

Some plain and fancy thinking can help unlock the value inherent in your employees’ knowledge and the value proposition you create for your customers’ changing needs and wants.

Complaints

The first source of complaints about focus groups is invariably the consequence of not doing them well, properly or professionally; for example, sloppy recruiting leading to a biased group; a moderator alienating his respondents with an arrogant psuedo-scientist attitude that evokes the responses people think he wants to hear … I could go on. Always the fault in these complaints is with the execution and not the method. All fair enough criticisms and all to be guarded against; but instructive only about doing the job properly.

Manipulation

Another criticism of focus groups is that they are manipulative usually for purposes of political spin. First, the spin comes from the politicians and their spin-masters; not the groups - in fact, you don’t even need groups to do spin. Secondly, though, what’s wrong with trying to formulate your best case in language that people find persuasive?

Category Error

Another set of complaints derive from a category error. These are typically complaints that qualitative research is not reliable, not projectible, not valid.

This amounts to a complaint that a Ferrari is not a truck.

This is a complaint that focus groups don’t do the same things as survey research questionnaires do. It’s not really a complaint then - it’s a claim: not grounded, not warranted, without any backing.

The category error is that focus groups are not of the class of things that do quantitative measuring. Quantitative is not of the class of things that can confer legitimacy on focus groups. They exist in different realms. Claim dismissed!

The Case of Conventional Responses

One complaint is that focus groups only get “conventional” responses. There is some confusion about this in that some people think this is inherent in the group process, which I don’t think it is. Focus groups often do evoke conventional superficial responses but I argue that is a result of a conventional moderator eliciting conventional responses.

One taxonomy of “reason-giving” includes: conventions or social formulae, stories or common sense narratives, codes or legal formulae, technical accounts or specialized stories. [Tilly quoted on Gladwell.com]

Early in my untrained self-learned career as a moderator, I quickly discovered that the best way to elicit the best responses was to be a real person and to give of myself early in the group so that I was not a scientist experimenting on respondents but a fellow human being on a credible search for understanding.

If I don’t act as if I want conventional responses but I am more interested in the complex and more deeply held meanings and motivations then I seldom get just conventional responses. And if we get them, another member of the group is as likely to challenge them as me.

In the Case of Brands

Jason Oke, with Leo Burnett, a Toronto ad agency (as quoted on Gladwell’s blog) takes us from the conventional to the importance of stories via a trip through brands.

“How we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story - we may both buy Tide, but there’s a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up. But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: ‘It’s a good value’, ‘my family likes it’, ‘it tastes good.’ And it seems because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc. most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.”

My view of moderating is that indeed much market research is superficial but there is a reason focus groups are called “depth research” and that is because it’s my job as a moderator to access the complex and deeply buried stories that are hard to consciously access.

Stories matter and the best story wins

But are stories the final word? Here is how the universe of meaning seems to me (having been a reader of Jurgen Habermas):

There are at least three ways of knowing:

[1] an empirical world of facts and things, knowable by science, technology and provable mathematically; that represent themselves as objective realities.

[2] a communicative way of knowing; social knowledge; the social construction of reality - it means what I can persuade you it means; it means what we agree it means; or, as McLuhan says, “Art is what you can get away with.” We can - you should note - agree to be wrong, stupid or uncivilized. It may be a common sense plain thinking but it needs tempering.

[3] a critical way of knowing involving very fancy thinking; spotting and questioning our assumptions, illusions, delusions, contradictions and lies; and liberating us from them to something, at least provisionally, recognized to be true.

So we understand that it is not enough just to record the stories and report. Not only is interpretation involved - but there is also critique. Are these representations clear, coherent and compelling in our client’s case? The job is not to just analyze peoples’ stories but to also synthesize a new story of client possibility.

Making Your Case - Evidence and Practical Reasoning

In marketing research, we are in the business of making claims like:- most people will vote for candidate A because … you should do option B for a spokesperson because … your image is suffering because …

As a matter of practical reasoning: we make claims - based on some grounds - which are warranted- given the backing.

In quantitative survey research, our findings are not facts; they are claims; grounded in the data; warranted by professional interviewing of a representative, proportional, random sample; backed by the scientific method and the laws of mathematical probability. Our claim in survey research is — THIS IS PROBABLY PRETTY CLOSE TO THE ANSWER YOU WANT.

In focus group research, our findings are claims; grounded by the testimony of (market) participants, warranted by the ideas and concepts we use to create pattern perception; backed by the character of living/open/meaning systems. Our claim in focus group research is - THIS IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU.

When I first started as a moderator 30 years ago, it was commonly said that focus groups were not really legitimate but they were useful. So they were used. Certainly a claim for pragmatism.

And that’s a fact.

But the fact is - we shouldn’t be looking for facts; we should be looking through the facts for evidence.

Testimony

Focus groups, in effect, take the testimony of those who are engaged in the act. I take their testimony and assemble the evidence, synthesizing it into a story; then I give my report as my testimony from an expert witness.

The point to understanding practical reasoning is to make our procedures evidence-based; that is what gives us judgmental confidence in making the case - your case for tomorrow.