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.
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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.
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