The Rise and Fall of Focus Groups
It makes sense to ask a representative sample about a marketing message or creative before it’s released, no? Asking people what they think about a certain product category or service? In University, you’re taught about focus groups in your marketing research class.
Apparently not. A few Arnold executives talk about why focus groups are skewed and slanted… here is a short breakdown:
1. Moderators can lead respondents
2. Alpha respondents can lead/sway the rest of the group
3. Spots that are easiest to understand/most familiar often win out
4. Concepts aren’t accurately reflected with cartoon storyboards
5. The mindset of respondents is to criticize no matter how objective you ask them to be. It’s human nature,
6. It’s not reflective of the media buy. I’m in this business and I can’t tell you what commercials I saw last night. Brands are built by a cumulative effect on multiple sources. You can’t expect brand preference to go up after ONE viewing of a bad animatic.
7. Time consuming. Creating these takes time and energy from the creative department.
8.Cost prohibitive. It’s not unusual to spend $300K to find out
9. Preconceived notions. Clients and agencies tend to have ideas of what they want to get from the focus groups so they look for those. One client felt we had a brand linkage problem when the moderator asked the groups to name a commercial in the client’s category. They didn’t name our commercials. I said that if they recalled our commercial, but couldn’t remember it was from us—that’s a brand linkage issue. But they couldn’t even name our spot which means we had a media issue.
10. Kills the creative process. If a spot tests well in groups, clients are unwilling to deviate from it when it comes time to shoot. So trying to get a good director to plus the boards? Forget it. The magic of ad-libs from the talent on shoot day? Forget it.
Testing unfinished work in front of people tend to be the real issue with focus groups (per the interview @ Influx). If you wanted to test against audience targeting and certain market features, then focus groups may statistically still work. Click here to see the video and interview over at Influx.