Charm School

Focus groups get smarter.

Imagine trying to get a group of teenage consumers to speak freely and honestly about--gulp--acne. Impossible? Not for Boulder, Colorado's Qualitative Research Centre (QRC), which got adolescents to face their fears.

As QRC--a leader in creative development research--demonstrates, focus groups (or, as QRC calls them, "consumer work-shops") are be-coming much more innovative. "The whole idea is to get people working together to dig deeper and deeper to find things that actually matter," says QRC's co-founder Arnie Jacobson.

To that end, QRC often gets workshop participants to do "reporting" assignments. During the aforementioned acne study, for instance, people were asked to photograph their medicine cabinets as well as draft self-portraits on spotted and spot-free days. "What they created," says Jacobson, "was very revealing."

Asked to reveal the rationale behind this new breed of consumer workshop, Jacobson stresses the importance of connecting with consumers as human beings. "If you ask some-body a question, there's this odd presumption that their answer is actually true--or that they care about what they're saying," he says. "That's pretty ridiculous."

Which is why there's so much interest in getting respondents to do collages, compile time capsules--and, yes, even take pictures of their medicine cabinets. "This gets [respondents] thinking about things on their own terms rather than under the pressure of [being in] a facility with a moderator and peers," says Jacobson. Seems focus groups are really breaking out.

This article was originally published in the June 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Charm School.