Dividends & Interest

Out of Focus

Craig Chappelow

Evaluating human experience is an inexact science and is probably best served by using a variety of approaches. That's why I am always a bit skeptical whenever some well-meaning person in a marketing situation suggests, “Let's set up a focus group!” For me it carries the same tone as those old Mickey Rooney movies where someone inevitably shouts, “Let's rent out a barn and put on a show!”

Focus groups have been around for a very long time, although nobody really knows when the first one took place. Most textbooks identify Robert Merton as the father of the modern focus group. One of the more influential sociologists of our time, Merton coined many terms we now use every day, like self-fulfilling prophecy and role model. His work shaped Kenneth Clark's historic brief in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of U.S. public schools.

The first real focus group took place at the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University. In 1941, Paul Lazarsfeld enlisted Merton's help in collecting audience reactions to radio programs. A group was assembled, and its members listened to radio shows and then pressed different colored buttons to indicate their positive or negative responses to questions they were asked about each show. At the end of the process Merton, suspecting that the respondents' answers might not be accurate because of the construction of the questions, asked the group members to discuss why they had responded as they did.

It probably didn't seem revolutionary to him at the time, but what Merton did was to move beyond the realm of closed questions. He experimented with these ideas and suggested that people were most open when they found themselves in a safe, comfortable place with individuals like themselves. Merton understood the importance of a skilled facilitator, and he pioneered the field of collecting group feedback through the use of a nondirective group leader. Merton's focus-group techniques were not used in academic research until the 1980s. Before that time they were used primarily for marketing research, to solicit the appeal of a product's characteristics to potential buyers. That was how, as a high school junior in 1974, I had my first experience with a focus group—and it left me wary for life.

Located in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, Tri-County Mall had all the characteristics of the typical shopping center—bland cement-block exterior, a couple of big department stores, and a vast parking lot—nothing special by today's standards. But if you grew up forty miles away in rural Indiana, as I did, it was the nearest outpost of civilization. On the rare occasion of a date, it offered the nearest movie theater. It also contained an actual sporting goods store, which offered basketball shoes beyond the local choice of black or white Chuck Taylor canvas Converse. With that goal in mind and a few bucks in my pocket I set off one summer afternoon in my mother's Ford Pinto. I had the day off from my summer job at a canoe livery and was looking forward to making the trip last all day.

I remember arriving at the mall and walking in through the upper-level entrance and being approached immediately by a well-scrubbed young woman with a clipboard. She asked me if I had five minutes to participate in a brief five-question survey. I agreed, and she proceeded to ask me some basic demographic questions. She listened attentively as I answered. She clung to every word, nodding appreciatively at my deep insights and made copious notes on her clipboard. I was sure that she had never heard demographic questions answered with such insight and conviction. When she finished, she told me that I was exactly the kind of wise and worldly person to help a leading manufacturer make some critical marketing decisions about its most important products. She asked me if I would be willing to spend about a half hour giving my valuable opinion on some exciting new products. How could I refuse? I had passed the rigorous selection process these experts had created to capture the best and the brightest. I was speaking for the people. The American consuming public depended on me. Then she threw in the kicker. I would receive a ten-dollar mall gift certificate for my time. I quickly did the math. Ten dollars for thirty minutes translated to twenty dollars per hour—compared to the three I hauled in at the canoe livery. Jackpot! It was a time in my life when I had nothing but time and very little money. I was a natural for focus groups. I silently wondered if I could make a career at this.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had officially become what is known in focus-group-speak as a mall intercept. She led me down a long hallway to a small, bare-walled room that already held eight other participants. I selected the last available folding chair and sat down. I looked around at my fellow participants and was surprised to see the motley collection of suspicious-looking people. All were older than I, and a couple of them looked pretty rough, including a bearded guy with a Hell's Angels jacket. Most wore expressions of resigned boredom. I suddenly took less pride in making it through the selection process. One woman had two giant Mexican-design rucksacks crammed with stuff on the floor next to her. She was telling anyone who would listen about the time she took part in a focus group and they actually had a buffet set up in the room. The participants could have as much as they wanted to eat, she wistfully recalled. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has suggested that “focus groups are people who are selected on the basis of their inexplicable free time and their common love for free sandwiches. . . . For many of these people it will be the first time they've ever been fed and listened to on the same day.” I have a feeling that describes most of us who were in the room.

The focus-group moderator took us through a warm-up exercise to loosen us up and set a tone of trust and safety. This consisted of his giving away free cigarettes to anyone who cared to smoke. Soon there was a heavy blue haze hanging over the room, and I slumped down in my chair, remembering that during a fire the best air is near the floor. Then the real focus-group activity started. The moderator asked for our responses to a variety of packaging options for personal hygiene products like deodorant and shaving cream. “Would you be more likely to buy product A or product B?” “Why?” Mexican-bag spoke up early and often and had an opinion on everything. The rest of us just sat there and listened. That is when I learned the importance of a skilled moderator to effective focus-group functioning. After rolling his eyes when Mexican-bag jumped in on the sixth or seventh question, he wheeled around on her and said, “Can you please be quiet for a while?”

For my part I did what I could. At sixteen I wasn't exactly a savvy consumer. And as far as personal hygiene went, I tended to use whatever products Dad left in the medicine cabinet, but that was never one of the multiple choices. After the session, which went on much longer than the promised thirty minutes, one of the participants told me that they had been waiting for a long time before I came in, and that they probably picked me because they were all getting tired of waiting for the moderator to get enough people to participate. The truth stung. I was a warm body—there only to achieve whatever numbers the marketers needed to complete the group. Maybe this wasn't the career I thought it could be. That did not, of course, keep me from buying a pair of basketball shoes with my gift certificate. (I kicked in the additional nine dollars myself). It did create a bad taste in my mouth about the validity of focus-group data.

I suspect that focus-group technique has evolved substantially since my experience at the mall thirty years ago, but I continue to see the results misused when higher importance is placed on focus-group data than on existing customer feedback. No matter how close a “representative sample” is to the demographic characteristics of actual customers, the bottom line is these people aren't really voting with their feet. They are just speculating about what they prefer and how much they would be willing to pay for it. Actual customers, in contrast, are putting their money where their mouth is, and we have to be ready to pay attention to what they do—not what a representative sample says. In his book How Customers Think, Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that focus groups don't work because they don't reflect experience at all. They merely represent hypothetical choices. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, they are not effective when developing and evaluating new product ideas, testing ads, or evaluating brand images.”

Robert Merton died in February 2003. His obituary in the New York Times stated that his work “led to the ‘focus groups’ that politicians, their handlers, marketers and hucksters now find indispensable. Long after he had helped devise it, Merton deplored its abuse and misuse but added, ‘I wish I'd get a royalty on it.’”