7 Tips for Effective Focus Groups
Posted: July 19th, 2009 in Innovation
Focus groups are a helpful way to conduct market research. While there are many guidelines for correct moderation,successful research starts with good planning – and ends with good analysis. Here are 7 tips to help you get the most out of your focus group research:
1. Use the right techniques at the right stage of research
This may sound obvious, but companies often fail to recognize the nature of their project and the right kind of research to conduct. As a standard rule of thumb, use exploratory research at the beginning of the project, and then move to more directed techniques such as hypothesis validation.
2. Limit the research scope
When planning research, companies have two options - to have a broad scope covering many areas, or conduct in-depth research in a specific subset. This is a difficult decision to make, and companies are often tempted to pursue both - usually leading to unsuccessful research uncovering few new impactful insights. The right scope is one that is not too narrow to limit opportunities, but not so broad that researchers cannot get any deep insights. Of course, a scope that is broad and in-depth would deliver the best of both world, but projects seldom have the budget to successfully pursue that.
3. Avoid validation of personal opinions
This is probably the oldest market research mistake, and unfortunately still a prevalent one. Market researchers are trained to avoid personal biases – but others often find it hard to forget them. The longer marketers and managers are in an industry, the more opinions they form. And worst of all, many start to see even the smallest reference from consumers to mean complete validation of an important insight.
4. Be careful of early conclusions
A close cousin to #3, early conclusions stem from jumping to “answers” early in the research instead of forming hypotheses. The correct technique is to always remind the team to rely on the data and findings to generate conclusions – at the end of research.
5. Maintain continuity
Companies often use independent moderators for research, even changing them from group-to-group to keep costs low. While this is great for the project’s budget, the loss of information from one moderator to the next severely impacts the potential of research. Moderators are your front lines for conducting research, and the more integrated they are throughout the project, the higher likeliness for strong insights. The same goes for other team members - as much as possible, maintain continuity.
6. Know who to listen to – and who to ignore
While it’s the moderator’s responsibility to ensure all respondents participate in the discussions – and to control the more talkative ones, marketers in the backroom should always be aware of the same. It’s easy to think something is true because you heard it repeatedly – but only from the same respondent.
7. Call it a day – reaching theoretical saturation
Chances are, you will reach theoretical saturation in some parts of your research – and it is important to recognize it. Rarely will you reach complete saturation for the entire topic, but you should recognize when you are hearing the same things over and over again. Depending on where you are in your research, it may be time to change gears and move on.