Focus Groups

Aim of a focus group

To develop a understanding of products and use this to refine our promo products.

Objectives

Learn how to find facilitate effective focus group and prepare to host one on Friday.

Through focus groups they are going to receive qualitative (opinions and feelings) so that the business (the people pitching) can review what their focus group say about their product(s) so that they can change or remove unwanted parts.

Effective research requires contributors who reflect the target audience in terms of age, gender, population, etc.

Things to avoid in a focus group

• Closed questions (don’t give much space for an answer)
• Leading questions (edges the respondents to give a specific answer)

Whats important

• 8-10 participants so all can be heard and not felt pressured.
• Pre-prepared questions and make sure that you ask all of them and that you are ready of the focus group.
• Record the session to make sure that you know everything what was said (full set of data).
• Introduction for the focus group (help the participant understand what is going to be talked about).
• Keep it so that everyone gets to talk (politely).

What useful things can come out of a focus group

• Observations that we were unaware of before about how the products may be interpreted by an audience.
• Suggestions about how the products might be further refined to make them more effective.

What to remember for our focus group

• We need to show the digipak and website BEFORE the video. This will enable us to test out whether or not the focus group can identify the genre the act is working in (which should obviously be given away by the video.
• We should defend our products at all. In fact we should just try to remain silent which they are talking (the people presenting to our focus group). We can reject ideas after the focus group but if we shut down the respondents during the presentation we wont be able to gather their true views.