Is There a Place for Focus Groups in Brand Research?

In most companies, market research is both confusing and misunderstood. Add the desire (and need) to better understand brand into the mix, and you have a recipe for even further confusion. After all, just because you measure something doesn’t mean you understand it.

Our experience shows that the utilization of research to drive brand insight requires multiple approaches to effectively measure brand experience, and understand ways to improve it.

The brand research toolbox includes various sampling methodologies.

Some of the most popular include one-on-one interviews, web and phone based surveys and focus groups. Deciding what approach to use comes down to the one question that simply isn’t asked (or more accurately, answered) often enough: what (exactly) are we trying to accomplish?

So when it comes to understanding your brand, where – if anywhere – do focus groups fit?

Bottom line, we don’t think that focus groups are an effective technique for this type of brand research. Why? Several reasons:

1. Even with a skilled moderator, focus groups tend to be influenced by the few dominant people in the group, driving potentially biased output.
2. Marketers find that focus groups tend to deliver a single perspective; individual opinions are hard to capture because of group dynamics.
3. As a series of opinion from groups of 9-12 people, the results simply aren’t projectable over a broader audience. Whether or not the opinions expressed are valid is one thing; but attempting to project these opinions over broader audiences simply isn’t possible.

In short, it’s really hard to quantify or validate results, the sample size is small, and you simply cannot generalize findings to the target population. In fact, we’ve been called in several times by organizations who have attempted to research their brand with focus groups to get to defensible conclusions, and failed.

And as a vehicle to quantitatively assess elements of a brand platform, focus groups are useless.

In our experience, focus groups tend to capture perceptions of a moment in time, not how customers really organize their lives and their emotions. And because group dynamics play such a large part in the findings, they aren’t effective for drawing conclusions about a given population, though they are often used for such purposes.

We’ve found that the most effective method of gathering qualitative data around current brand perceptions are one-on-one interviews: with employees, customers and prospects, as well as the broader market. In our experience, the “one-on-one” interview process yields insights and frank, honest opinions much more effectively than traditional focus group formats, while costing substantially less.

From this come competitive insights, indicators of brand loyalty and experience, and insights into what drives brand attitudes and perceptions. Once organized, the brand and its position in the market can be validated with projectable follow-on customer experience and brand research.

So Where Do Focus Groups Fit?

The whole idea of focus groups is get people to project their opinions and attitudes in an interactive group setting, where participants are free to talk with other members of the group. As a result, they’re more of an open-ended elicitation than some of the other methods in the brand research toolkit. In our experience, they can work well for brainstorming new brand ideas, perceptual mapping or gathering creative and concept feedback.

To be honest, all marketing research is subject to Nobel prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg’s famous observation: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." But  if you’re trying to brainstorm a new brand, creative concepts or brand extensions, focus groups are a great place to start (or finish). But if you’re trying to quantify your current brand, validate your position vs. your competition, understand attributes and values for internal audiences and external customer segments, then stick with methodologies which you can validate and defend.

________________________________________________

© 2010 Michael Hinshaw and MCorp Consulting. All rights reserved. This article was originally posted on Touchpoint Insights, the MCorp Consulting blog. Touchpoint Mapping®, Brand MappingSM and Loyalty Mapping®  are registered trademarks of MCorp Consulting.