focus groups

Bunch of grapes or bunch of arse?

  • Monday, 1 March, 2010
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“We’ve got to have the ability to enable customers to share”
Random London Taxi driver spouting opinion on social media
“‘ere,  you say you’re in IT, whatcha make of this Facebook and twitter malarky? That Stephen Fry, what a tw@t, I don’t care that he’s just woken up and brushed his teeth. Now that QI, its a fix. He’s not so bright, he doesn’t know all the answers etc etc etc….  I’ll tell ya, Facebook and all that sh!t is a bunch of arse”.

“We’ve got to have the ability to enable customers to rate and review products”
Random UK customers in a focus group
Facilitator “So if I gave you all these user reviews for the product, or a review by Martin Lewis, who are you going to go with?”  Group: “Martin Lewis…  yeah, I trust him, no idea who these people who write reviews are… what’s in it for them?…  they are paid by the company aren’t they (cynical agreement etc)”

“Blackberrys are the business users phone”
Random teenagers in shopping centre talking about their mobile phones
“You’re nobody if you don’t have a Blackberry”  (Ummmm, aren’t Blackberry’s the business person’s phone?)  “You’ve got to have one coz of the Blackberry PIN for texting”

Sometimes you can get hung up in your view of the world, you make assumptions about the way the world works.  Yet it can be refreshing to go out onto the street and canvas ideas and feedback.  That may be as simple as striking up people on the street (people love to talk), or running focus groups for no particular research purpose other than taking the pulse of what people think.  Or it may be spending time on the shop floor.  Get out of the office for a day and have fun seeing your customers, consumers of your idea, in the wild.  I’m not saying you take the word of a taxi driver, a comment from a single focus group or an anecdote from a shopping centre as gospel, but it might make you think and spark some new, unexpected and contrary ideas

Just ignore what they say

  • Thursday, 3 December, 2009
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What customers say they like and how they behave are not the same thing. Don’t always trust what you are told, use data and real insights to drive decisions that have major commercial implications.

So there was a skyscraper, banner and numerous MPUs across the website.  A survey panel was set up and the results came back.  The agency briefed the team, “Your customers really don’t like all the ads you have on the page”.  The message was reiterated in focus groups.  Ditch the ads.  This would be a painful decision, despite customer’s not liking them they were still delivering reasonable revenue.

The organisation was striving to be more customer-centric; if the advertisements were degrading the customer experience then removing them would be a price worth paying.  And so they were switched off.

The result?  Nothing.  Except lost revenue.  Analysing the data, customer volumes remained the same.  There was no difference in the successful completion of customer goals.  Switching the ads off had no impact on customer behaviour on the site; when asked customers said they didn’t like them, but what they said and what they did were different things.

The moral: if you are going to use emotion and what customers say to make commercial decisions, consider A/B testing with real data before making wholesale changes.

Fear of focus groups

  • Tuesday, 7 July, 2009
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I was recently talking to some IT professionals.  We were talking about customer journeys and understanding the customer needs.  They were second guessing these, making assumptions about what is important to the customer how how the customer would best interact with the application.

“How about running a focus group with customers?” I suggested.  Blank expressions.  “Not sure” came the response, “we’ve never done those before”.

But you have done that before.  Every time you run a workshop with the business, that is a focus group.  The listening skills are the same.  Effective facilitation, and using stimuli to promote debate, elicit opinions and test ideas- they are the same.   You just have a different audience and call focus groups something different.

IT should have no fear of talking to real customers, end users.  Getting them together in workshops is something that should come as naturally to IT as it does to the marketeers.  Let’s get focus groups into the vocabulary of any IT project.