Focus Group Marketing

Focus Group -- Ideal Composition

Focus groups are a powerful means to evaluate services or test new ideas." Basically, focus groups usually involve six to ten people. All of the members test and discuss a product, either individually or at the same time, and then reconvene in the same group to discuss their subjective impressions and experiences with a member of the marketing team. A company can gain a great deal of information during a focus group session, albeit from subjective sources and from a relatively narrow base of opinion. Thus designing the demographic makeup of the focus group is crucial to obtaining useful and accurate results from this often-expensive process. (McNamara, 1999)

When designing a focus group, the most obvious selection criteria might be to find the product's target marketing group, as determined beforehand through less expensive marketing measurements such as surveys and questionnaires, and create a virtual sampling room, of a market base that is likely to enjoy and respond to the product. In other words, one would not 'pack' a room of focus group participants with senior citizens for a focus group testing pink hair dye or blue catsup. However, no marketing sample is perfect, and very often an unexpected target marketing group can open up, in a focus group environment if the selection of individuals is broader than research and initial product positioning might allow. For instance, new prepared or frozen healthy television dinners might be initially targeted at single, young women along the lines of Lean Cuisine, but such dinners also might be quite popular amongst older people who do not cook for large amounts of people on a daily basis, do not wish to waste a great deal of uneaten food even though the have small appetites, but still wish to eat healthfully.

Thus the composition of a good focus group should not be too broad -- in other words, it should not look like a stereotypical Hollywood canteen filled with extras from a variety of films, from working-class policemen to Southern belles, but it should not be so narrow that unexpected markets cannot be opened up.

Works Cited

McNamara, Carter. (1999) "Basics of Conducting Focus Groups." Retrieved on October 7, 2004 at http://www.mapnp.org/library/evaluatn/focusgrp.htm