Tweet

Focus Groups are for Lipstick, not Technology

Written by: Rebel Brown

Article Overview: You're launching a new product, so of course you test your messages with customers. After all, you want to make sure your customers' mouths water (and their wallets open) when they hear your story. More than that, you want to get to know your target market; learn to think like them, speak like them, understand how they react to your story. So you decide to run a focus group. That's what everyone does, right? Wrong. In my humble experience the high technology market does not lend itself to focus groups.

Focus Groups are for Lipstick, not Technology

You're launching a new product, so of course you test your messages with customers. After all, you want to make sure your customers' mouths water (and their wallets open) when they hear your story. More than that, you want to get to know your target market; learn to think like them, speak like them, understand how they react to your story. So you decide to run a focus group. That's what everyone does, right? Wrong.

In my humble experience the high technology market does not lend itself to focus groups.

Unless you want a stilted result. In that case you can go ahead and put 10 - 20 people in a room and ask them all the same questions at the same time - and watch the group dynamics replace the customer truth.

But if you want an honest, accurate customer moment - you have to do it 1:1. Mano-a-mano.

Focus groups work great for markets that are trendy - where buyer behavior follows a herd mentality. Which is mostly in the consumer space.

Take lipstick for example. Back in my grad school days, I worked as a gopher for a hot ad exec in the Chicago area. We ran focus groups all the time - for everything from Soul Train programming to haircare products to McDonald's ads to - yes, lipstick and cosmetics. As part of my gopher role I had the chance to sit 'behind the mirror' and listen to the dynamics on both sides of that piece of glass.

What did I learn?

• Groups have Alphas and Others. Even strangers who met each other five minutes ago will follow group dynamics quickly - and Alphas and Others will appear.
• Alphas will lead, Others will follow.
• Alphas will suppress Others' ideas or opinions that differ from theirs.
• Others will stifle or change their own stated ideas to be 'accepted' by their Alphas.

But these were focus groups with consumers. So what does that have to do with technology?

Everything.

Group dynamics are group dynamics. And those are exactly the dynamics that can give you great insight for popular trends like lipstick colors, car body designs and more. Trendy is great when you can leverage it to compel or attract the masses from specific demographic targets. High technology products focused on consumers can certainly use group dynamics to create compelling market dynamics. Phones, games, laptops and PDAs can fall into this category at a consumer level.

But IT and business executives don't make decisions based on the trendiest thing. Sure, you may think they do. They get excited about the latest whizfloppy, right? But they don't spend budget dollars based on trends. They really don't. Ask yourself: When is the last time a CXO called you and placed a $400K order because 'everyone else is buying it'? Wouldn't that make it easy:)

The best way to find your customer truth is to talk to your customers about their specific situation. In an environment where they can share their truth - uninterrupted and with ease.

One-on-one, up close and personal.

Related Articles
  Could You Increase Sales During this Economic Crisis?
  A Pig In Lipstick? Let's Focus On The Right Things
  Find out what your customers REALLY want
  Marketing Mythology Putting Lipstick on a Pig
  You Can Put Lipstick On A Pig, But It's Still A Pig

Article Tags: accurate customer, alphas, buyer behavior, chicago area, consumer space, focus group, gopher, grad school days, group dynamics, herd mentality, high technology, humble experience, launching a new product, li li, lipstick, mano a mano, piece of glass, soul train, target market, technology market



Related Forum Posts
Re: On Which Social Media Sites Are You Most Active? - It's great to hear how you're using it Bill - the strength of Groups is discussion so for anybody who wants to primarily use it for discussions you should look at Groups. The limit I believe is 5,000 members. If you want to do anything other than discussions then you definitely want to set up a Page. Good luck everyone!
Lipstick Jungle & Cashmere Mafia - Has anyone been watching these shows? I have been watching Cashmere Mafia and really enjoying it, until I watched Lipstick Jungle last night. Finally - a show that really reflects what successful women are having to deal with! your thoughts??
Mastermind Group - Is this the same as Evan's Mastermind Groups?
Mastermind Groups - Hi Guys I just wondered whats the 'Mastermind Groups' section about on the forum?
Successes at My Space - [quote:37w3bsp7]do you mind sharing some of your successes with MySpace? [/quote:37w3bsp7] Hi, Evan Actually the successes I was talking about was with the Groups feature - there are soooo many groups there of interest to me, from the fiction to the sciences, that I've joined them all. I don't find Facebook's Groups stuff to be user-friendly at all. I will say that the more I browse, the more I just shake my head at what people do there (as well as on Facebook, of course). Profile pages where the text of everything is illegible, either because they have a dark, illustrated background - which looks nice but makes it impossible to read anything, or because they choose weird colors - one person I saw yesterday used light red text on a dark green background. And when you read their blog entries or even the text on their profiles... it's like they can't put together a coherent sentence, let alone spell any of the words properly. And I don't think they parse other people's writings very well, either... Well..end of rant I'm just annoyed because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm sure everyone's out in the fun and the sun instead of being at home surfing the web [and in particular my site]!


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Reverse Mentoring

Is the iPad useful? One CEO tells all ....

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.