The Advantages of Focus Groups and How to Do Them Well
Focus groups are a cornerstone qualitative research approach for good reason. They are an excellent methodology when it is necessary to consider diverse perspectives and views. But to conduct a focus group, three crucial things must be done correctly to ensure a useful outcome.
What Is the Main Purpose of a Focus Group?
Focus groups are qualitative research, so like other types of qual (including interviews and ethnographies), their purpose is to go deeper than the numbers. Qualitative research is essential to understand the complex human experiences and emotions behind the statistics produced by quant surveys or data analysis. In particular, qualitative research allows us to understand why people think or behave the way they do.
Because focus groups and interviews are discussions conducted in real-time, they allow us to gather much richer information. Even though survey questions can be open-ended, it’s much easier to explain complex attitudes and motivations verbally than in writing. An answer that takes someone ten seconds to speak out loud might take them a whole minute to write out—which means they probably won’t write it. And in these discussion-based methods, we can ask follow-up questions of our participants to get necessary clarification or detail—which is often the key to those “a-ha” moments of insight.
Advantages of Focus Groups vs. Other Qualitative Methods
Range of Viewpoints Represented
Focus groups are unique among qualitative research methodologies in that they involve talking with a group of people simultaneously. This means we can gather a whole range of ideas and opinions from a specific group or type of people—say, a target segment—all at once. So, focus groups are ideal for understanding what is “typical” of a group or class of people—where the consensus lies and where there are divergences. Sure, you could conduct individual interviews with the same number of people, but this would be much more time and labor intensive.
Insight into Social Dynamics
Focus groups are also particularly useful for delving into topics with a strong social component. Say you’re researching perceptions of a university’s student experience—a focus group allows you to hear how current students describe that university to each other. You can see what jokes they make, what complaints they bring up, and what ideas generate a stir among the group. Since the student experience is social in nature, it makes sense to gather feedback on it in a social setting.
Better for Idea Generation
Among the types of qualitative market research, focus groups are the best methodology for generating a large number of ideas—whether you’re looking for new product concepts, marketing messages, ways to improve the customer experience, etc. Anyone who’s ever brainstormed in a group will know how a group’s ideas and energy can feed off each other, producing new and creative ideas that individuals wouldn’t have come up with by themselves.
Speed & Cost-Effectiveness
Focus groups are often the quickest and least expensive way to gather qualitative insight because they can gather input from more people than interviews or ethnographies in just a few sessions. As long as understanding each individual’s particular opinions and experiences in detail is not essential, focus groups are usually sufficient to give us the rich, nuanced insight we want from qual without breaking the bank.
How Focus Groups Can Inform Your Marketing Strategy
Focus groups can help us gain rich, nuanced insights to inform nearly any part of your marketing strategy. Here are some ways to leverage focus groups:
To gain an in-depth understanding of the behaviors, attitudes, and motivations of your target segments with respect to your category
To test brand positioning directions or marketing messages with real consumers and identify which ones resonate the most and why
To understand customers’ journeys of engagement with your brand or product, from discovery to purchase
To identify key differentiators and “moments of delight” in the typical customer experience to highlight in marketing
To gather detailed feedback on ads or creative concepts and understand how they could be improved
To generate ideas for marketing content (social media, short videos, web articles, how-to guides, etc.) that target consumers will see as truly relevant and compelling
In fact, there are so many ways focus groups could inform your marketing strategy that you should narrow your objectives to just a few for any given focus group. That way, you can carefully craft a discussion guide that asks the right questions and spends enough time on each topic to elicit the most valuable insights.
How to Properly Set Up a Focus Group
Recruiting the Right People
First, recruitment is key. It’s fundamental. Any focus group that doesn’t get recruitment right will fail to provide the rich, useful findings that clients seek. After all, all the insights come from the people in the group. The recruitment must represent the proper people—be they customers, students, or voters—or else the information they provide will be misleading.
Yet recruitment is rarely a straightforward process. First, you have to align on who should be in the group and why. Once established, finding those people and getting them to agree to take the time out of their day for someone else’s research is often quite challenging. This step only grows more complex each day as the target audiences that marketers and researchers need to reach become narrower and harder to find.
We take great pride in the quality of our recruiting, which ensures that our clients can hear from true representatives of their target audiences. When confronted with delivering a difficult audience, we combine creativity with decades of expertise to resolve the challenge. Our team pairs innovative and traditional recruitment methods with creative engagement tactics to ensure our clients’ market research goals are met using the best possible group of respondents.
Last year, we had a 98% fill rate and 93% show rate—meaning we filled 98% of the focus groups spots we sought to fill, and 93% of the respondents we recruited showed up. Those stats are very high in the market research space and all the more impressive considering how niche many of our recruitment audiences are.
Selecting the Right Moderator
Second, having an excellent moderator is also critical. Leading a successful group discussion is a unique challenge—it requires the ability to tease out the nuances of meaning while listening and responding to messages that aren’t being verbalized among a large group of people, each of whom may express themselves differently. A moderator must be an interpretation expert who can unpack messages and discern patterns. Nowadays, moderators must also be skilled at conducting qualitative market research virtually, with all the challenges that accompany online focus groups.
At Campos, we work with a group of terrific moderators who are experts in their field and have conducted groups over many years in various industries and for an incredibly diverse roster of clients. Our moderators partner closely with Campos strategists to draft discussion guides designed to elicit deep insights related to our clients’ objectives. Whether gathering feedback on creative materials like advertisements, digging into category behaviors and habits, or teasing out opinions on sensitive subjects, our moderators have the experience needed to deliver what our clients need to take action as a result of our market research.
Crafting a Great Discussion Guide
The third essential ingredient of running successful focus groups is the discussion guide. The guide is not a script—any moderator worth their salt will know when they should depart from the guide to follow an interesting tangent or probe for more in-depth answers. But having a solid discussion guide is critical to ensure the focus group answers the client's most important questions and doesn’t get sidetracked into irrelevant chatter.
Producing a high-quality discussion guide first requires carefully considering the focus group’s objectives. Are you trying to gather feedback on existing ad concepts or generate ideas for new ones? Are you trying to understand consumers’ attitudes toward competitors or why consumers purchase products in your category? All of these will require asking very different sorts of questions. Campos strategists work closely with our clients in a consultative fashion to thoroughly understand their business needs and the motivations behind the research so that we can ensure that the discussion guide is thoroughly on-point.
Sometimes, asking a simple, direct question isn’t the best tactic, as people don’t always have immediate access to their thoughts and feelings about a topic. We often conduct projective exercises like image association to get at deeper emotional resonances or use human-centered design methodologies to generate ideas. We might also ask respondents to complete assignments, like creating collages or short videos, to jog their thinking. Our strategists and moderators are trained in industry best practices and have decades of combined experience in the right type of questions to elicit honest, actionable feedback.
Focus Groups: Impact & Results
Campos recently conducted a series of focus groups for an arts organization that stand as a good example of how to successfully utilize this market research methodology. This organization was looking to establish a refreshed brand strategy that would help them attract new customer segments without alienating their core customer of today. Campos conducted focus groups with both current visitors and target non-visitors to better understand things like:
What do current customers truly value about the organization and the experiences they have when visiting this institution? How does a visit make them feel? What keeps them going back?
What about the organization is appealing to potential visitors? What could motivate them to visit? What sorts of adjacent institutions do they visit and why?
We then used these insights to inform the development of a refreshed brand strategy, which we tested quantitatively with visitors and potential visitors.
Similarly, we recently partnered with a different arts organization refreshing its brand strategy, but pursued a slightly different approach. For this client, we used focus groups as an opportunity to gather feedback from target customers on new brand platforms that were already developed. This provided an opportunity for target customers to tell us which strategy was resonating more with them and why.
Both approaches provided our clients with clear, research-backed guidance on how to brand and market themselves moving forward to grow visitation.
Let’s Talk.
Ultimately, we are always confident going into focus groups because we know we’ve nailed the recruit, have a thoughtful discussion guide, and have an excellent moderator teed up to lead the discussion. Want to embark on qualitative research with this same level of confidence? Let’s talk.