Focus Groups - MISapplied!

Someone posted this video of a focus group discussing what is widely perceived to be the greatest commercial of all-time - Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Ad . Admittedly, they are discussing a 24 year-old commercial, and talking about a product that is much better known now - although the participants do not appear to be the savviest of techno-geeks. Still, that does not prevent them from having an opinion on advertising, like everybody else on the planet. Check it out!

In the video, these participants are asked for their reactions to the creative work, and asked what might be done to make the commercial more effective for them.

The ensuing inanity led the poster to conclude (from the evidence?) that focus groups are "dumb", and are dying as a research methodology.

No wonder advertising agencies HATE focus groups; dumb in - dumb out. There are so many things wrong with this depiction of focus groups that we don't have time to list them all. But here are some of them:

First of all, focus groups should never be used to assess the worth of creative. They are no more capable of doing that than they are assessing whether a new product will be a hit. As a methodology, focus groups are a terrible tool for getting people to look at new ideas and judge how good or cool or worthwhile those ideas are. Most people just cannot do that in a two hour session. What they can do is give you a glimpse of their lives and help you decide HOW a new product might be best applied or used or might make their lives better or easier. Groups just aren't going to give you cutting edge thinking, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.

Second, if you are going to test a new product or new idea in groups as a means of REFINING, for goodness sake, do it with a potential target audience. You would not test a new skateboard product with country girls and you would NOT test a cutting edge computer concept with the general public (which is obviously the make-up of this group).

All this video does is show an excellent example of the ways that focus groups are misapplied every day in the marketing world - and the real crime is NOT the expense of the poor effort, but the opportunity cost of what might have been had the groups been done right. In a real-world situation, the moderator would know better. Right?