Never, Ever, Use Focus Groups. Just Don’t Do It.
Or, why you should distrust anyone who still uses focus groups in innovation research.
It’s 2020. That means that many of the world’s biggest, most powerful and most influential businesses are celebrating an anniversary. As of this year, they have been purposefully stupid and half blind for around 80 years, courtesy of an addiction to the focus group.
It is truly puzzling why the focus group still exists as a viable option for any kind of commercial research. It is an antiquated methodology that has no place in a world of applied research that proports to be customer-centric, user-centric, human-centric, or any other kind of centric other than business-centric. The fact that it is 80 years old and still being used on a regular basis is either an indication that it is the single most successful research methodology in the history of humankind, or it is a left-over from a time long past and its presence is a testament to the intellectual bankruptcy of market research. While the truth is likely somewhere in between, our bet is on the possibility that it is much closer to the second than the first.
Why is the focus group still with us? What is wrong with it? Why should you immediately distrust anyone using it in the innovation space? That is what this article is about.
The madness started in 1938 when a psychoanalyst named Ernst Dichter left his home in Vienna to escape the Nazis and arrived in New York. Finding a demand for his skills as a researcher, he began to apply his Freudian schooling to helping corporations supposedly understand their consumers. The first was P&G and its Ivory Soap brand which Dichter pronounced was, while bathing, “the one time when puritanical Americans were allowed to caress themselves.” Too sexually Freudian for the client, he amended his “insight” to become that the soap offered a psychological cleansing. For P&G, the result was an incredibly successful new slogan: “Get a fresh start with Ivory Soap and wash all your troubles away.” For Dichter, it was the beginning of a very successful career as “the father of motivational research” working with some of America’s biggest corporations. And for consumers, subject as they were to his Freudian methods of probing the unconscious through free association and Rorschach tests, it was the birth of the focus group.
By the middle of the twentieth century, even anthropology and sociology were in thrall of similarly “scientific” experimental methods. A short-lived variant of anthropology called Industrial Anthropology experimented with using laboratory style experiments to study the nature of human behaviour. Their approach was to control the conditions surrounding someone’s action to understand behaviour in its purist form, free of any outside influence. This approach attracted businesses like Nestlé who employed with this kind of “scientific” approach well into the 1970s. The laboratory format became one of the fundamental elements of business research, and an entire industry of laboratory-like spaces grew up. These focus group facilities placed glass between the subjects of the study and the researchers and fostered a ritualized approach to managing the “human factor.” In the meantime, anthropologists and sociologists abandoned these quasi-scientific methods because they destroyed one of the most important things you need to understand human behaviour: the environment in which it happens. It also has the unpleasant side-effect — or perhaps intention — of turning human beings into lab rats.
Subsequent work by Dichter furthered the idea that human behaviour is best described as some sort of unconscious resultant — which carried with it the idea that people do not understand their own behaviours and it requires a scientist to identify them. Dichter found an association between cake, fertility and childbirth for Betty Crocker, cars and male sexual potency for Standard Oil and Esso, and the value of teaching grooming skills to young women and attracting ideal husbands courtesy of Barbie. Ultimately, insights were amended to be more palatable and amped up or dampened down on the sexuality to serve the ultimate business aim: the “mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer.”
Dichter was a pioneer in using psychology as the basis for understanding the behaviour of consumers. That his approach was problematic is obvious, but its problems do not just stem from the idea that human behaviour is generated unconsciously. No, his approach brought the idea that only a researcher, working in conditions suitable for the researcher, can delve into the “truth.” A master of leading conversations to highly emotional places, Dichter’s psychoanalytic training had him making massive intuitive leaps and delivering purely interpretive conclusions to his clients. The focus group environment essentially weaponized his approach because it made him, and moderators like him, the ultimate arbiters of what happened in their space. Whether this continues to be the challenge of the methodology is unclear; do moderators continue to engage in Dichter-like interpretive arts or do they merely report on what is said? Is this approach really designed to see behaviour in its purest form, or is it developed to allow the researcher to have the final word?
According to Douglas Rushkoff, the answer is probably ‘yes’. He argues that focus groups are useless and that they solely aim to please the organization sponsoring them by cherry picking so-called data from them to support the organization’s foregone conclusions or aims. One of those aims, says former Apple SVP of Industrial Design, Johnny Ive, is not to “offend anyone and produce bland, inoffensive products.” And they litany of pundits criticizing the well-worn research method goes on and on for a variety of reasons related to why the focus group is ultimately a much-flawed methodology.
But the flaws of the methodology are not what should disqualify the focus group from ever being employed again. Sure, producing bad research is reason enough for dumping it in the trash where it belongs. Just consider the fact that the focus group eliminates the core of what human centered research is said to best capture: the personal, social and cultural complexity of being human. Or that the focus group continues to maintain the gap between what, as representatives of consumers, participants say they do and what they actually do. Or that the opinions researchers hear — particularly about products and/or services that focus group participants have never used — are confused with the customer voice when such customers have no actual experience and thus are incorrect, inaccurate, misleading or pure fiction.
Perhaps arguably more problematic than its flawed results, however, is how the focus group occurs. Given how we are now living through the era of human centricity, one would think that the focus group would have curled up and died. But no, some highly immoral companies and consultancies — many of which hype their commitment to human centric research and innovation — continue to keep the method alive and invest in results steeped in very unhuman centric processes. Such as?……
Over-Focused Recruiting
No recruiting is more targeted than focus group recruiting. Where other forms of consumer research, like ethnography, usually rely on experience as the litmus test for participation, rounding up a focus group panel typically involves qualifying feature after qualifying feature: age, ethnicity, tax bracket, habits and more often determine who gets in and who stays out. If recruiting for a focus group could clearly include the totality of preferences, experiences and other critical determinants it would. Then, of course, research results would be foregone conclusions — exactly what the focus group crowd would love.
Interrogation and Observation
Arguably the most problematic feature of the focus group because of what is suggestively indicates about those behind the research has got to be the room’s mirror. To be able to hide behind this feature and observe the participants like unknowing animals at the zoo has got to be the most un-human-centric aspect of the focus group. It reeks of an agency imbalance where, like primitive or zoo-like consumers, participants are observed and, through note-passing to the moderator, controlled by those in power. If you do this, no amount of free M&Ms can absolve you of the guilt you now bear.
Super-structured Discussions
If there is one aspect of conducing consumer research that we’ve never understood it has to be the discussion guide. It is the ultimate bastardization of the normal human rules of having a discussion. And nowhere is what should be an open talk between people to learn more screwed up than in the focus group where dim-witted organizational representatives insist on seeing what feels like a script before the little play begins. Those who actually seek to learn would be best served by ditching this un-tool. It ruins any openness, spontaneity or possibility of having an actual human conversation.
Sanitizing Real Life
Given the age and culture from which it was born, it should come as no surprise that the focus group is an attempt to “capture” insights from an event that sterilizes real life like no other. The diametric opposite of ethnography, the focus group attempts to sell its sponsor on the idea that insights can come from a virtually staged environment. This is not real life: not what is represents, how it feels or smells, or how it shapes people and their opinions and preferences. This is a sterile room shared by strangers who might never meet again. Without the messiness of real life, it and its conclusions are not real.
Misrepresenting the Methodology
One of the most egregious problems with the current state of the focus group is that it appears in the list of human-centric methodologies or even as a form of ethnography. This is a sleight-of-hand that is typical in the innovation industry. A consultant will say that they use anthropological methods and then run most of their work in a focus group facility with translators and clients behind glass. They are not only fooling themselves, they are fooling their clients into thinking that ethnographic methods and a focus group format are compatible in any way, and that you can get equivalent results using the easy, convenient focus group format. This is not just bad research, it is unethical. It is the equivalent of using liquid mercury to cure a fever. While it was an established treatment four hundred years ago, it is now considered to be dangerous insanity.
The Telephone Game
One hallmark of the focus group is the use of simultaneous translations and translated transcripts to produce insights. This is not a human-centric methodology because of the inherent problems in translation. The purpose of a human-centered behavioural study is to understand how a person thinks and to explain why they do what they do with sufficient clarity to build something new for them to use. You cannot achieve this level of understanding by reading transcripts translated by someone else. If the translation was worked on for months, or even years, like many translated books or scholarly works are, then it would be possible. But a quick translation is never sufficient. Anyway, a real researcher works in the language of the people they are working with. If they cannot speak it, they hire someone who can do this work. Beware the consultancy who does not work in primary language.
Pearl-Clutching over “Bias”
The idea that the focus group space is a “scientific” arena suitable for the analysis of human behaviour allows users of the focus group to believe that they have created an unbiased space for research. This tends to make them highly sensitive to perceived bias in the actions of the moderator or researchers. But all of this is so far from the truth as to be laughable. The controlled environment is itself a physical and social manifestation of heavy bias. The space itself conveys a power imbalance and signals to the participants that they must respond in a particular way. Human beings are very good at reading contextual cues and aligning their behaviour accordingly. Most people have some understanding of what is expected of them in an environment of this kind because of representations of this kind of research in films and television. So they fall in line and follow the rules. This means their behaviour and their comments are immediately biased and compromised.
This means that instead of being an unbiased environment and practice, the focus group is a bias engine. It is a perfectly designed ritual space that takes human beings and turns them into consumers. It does this in a way that effaces any sense of their true lives. But it does it so effectively, that it transforms the participants into the perfect respondents. Those who do not complete this transformation well are labelled a “bad respondent” and subtly marginalized in the study. This means that the study is really only conducted with people who are good at being respondents. This is bias in its purist form.
Over-Design is Just Client-Focused Theatre
We once had a client who told us that they conducted a focus group with a consultant who they found to be skilled and very thorough. They planned the session for over a month, writing several drafts of the discussion guide and carefully selecting the respondents. They passed drafts back and forth and made sure that the session would be run without any complications. Then, during the sessions they were masterful moderators, asking people about how they used their mobile phones, what they bought when they looked for fashion accessories, and then ultimately the most important question, which of the colourways the phone should have in mass production (red, black, yellow, or blue). They ran a force-rank exercise just to reinforce what people said and found that blue and red were the most popular colours. Our client felt they had the answer and the justification for going with red and blue, and that the focus group was a complete success. On the way out, they allowed the respondents to take a phone of their choice as a thank you gift for participating. They quickly ran out of black phones but were left with boxes and boxes of blue and red ones.
It begs a very real question, doesn’t it?
Several of the Other Questions to Ask Your Vendor:
Do you use focus group formats or conduct any research in focus group facilities?
(If Yes) How quickly can you see yourself out?
What is the purpose of the research programme you have laid out?
Why are the marginal gains in convenience worth the loss of all of the human details we need to understand?
What other options do you have that are more appropriately human-centric?
How do you mitigate the bias that is part of your research programme?
Are you able to speak the language(s) of the people we need to talk to?
(If no) Will the researcher you hire be able to do this?
Why is your discussion guide so prescriptive? How can you allow for open discovery?
What can we do to preserve the details of real life and thin out the obstructive methods?
Why are you keeping us behind glass?
Can we work with the participants directly?
By Dr. Morgan Gerard