What is a focus group?

Today we learned about focus groups, on Thursday our focus group will take place and we will find out about weaknesses and strengths of our products via communication with potential audience.

During this lesson we looked at two different ways of focus groups research, in both cases focus groups were used in early stages of concept or new products development, so producers may understand the way in which they need to work and what disadvantages their ideas have already, therefore they interact with respondents in an informal way trying by asking opened-ended questions reveal respondent's opinion on the product.

The first research was revealing the opinion of the focus group on new biscuits forms and tastes. It had several problems which we payed attention to and wrote them down, so the on Thursday avoid them and make our research more useful and less bias. First of all, the focus group was not very representative as it consisted mostly of children and their behaviour is unpredictable therefore the researcher can't really rely on them. Also, the rest of the audience are children's mothers who are kind of representative as they are suppliers of food for their children but their opinion is also bias as it depends upon their relationship with a child and the way of raising a particular child, therefore the audience for this research is not representative and it can manage the result, because there is a wide range of other ages who are potential buyers of these biscuits.
However, there are some positive aspects during this research, a researcher was find and friendly, he prepossess to him the whole audience, he joked and therefore children were not shy. Also, the first attempt to this attachment with the audience he has done when he bought biscuits into the room and allow children to eat as much as they can, therefore children were already happy and were not bothering regarding the tension and research in which they are involved.

The second research was targeted mainly on pet owners and tried to reveal their opinion on new pet food. During this video there are two groups of researchers who via collaborating with focus groups ere trying to understand their opinion and realise disadvantage and advantages of products and why some people won't buy it for their pets. In the first one the researcher had already a final idea in his mind, therefore focus group contribution was not useful for him and for the whole group. They were persuading the focus group respondents that the product is excellent and that they must admit it and buy it in future. They were ignoring comments and responses, therefore they was no use of that focus group contribution. The second group worked more with the audience however, they didn't chat with respondents, instead of asking opened-ended questions they were talking a lot to them, trying explain their idea. The main idea of making people by themselves to realise what product is about and get their opinion, they were influencing on their opinion and therefore this focus group research also is useless.

So basically the point of the focus group is to get the info from the focus group about the product, it must be neutral, not biased and to get an objective opinion all questions must be easy built and open-ended so that the focus group can interpret them and answer.