the new science of focus groups

American Demographics, March 1, 2003

Byline: Alison Stein Wellner

Last fall, 15 million students headed off to college, many moving into that mysterious world known as the dorm. These first-time dorm denizens, along with their other college peers, spent an estimated $210 billion in 2002 on everything from microwave ovens to shower loofahs, representing a tantalizing marketing opportunity.

Yet how can retail-product designers, well beyond their college years, know what their young customers do not: what life in a dorm is like today? How can they help young adults away from home for the first time figure out how to navigate communal bathrooms as well as the intricacies of the clothes washer and dryer?

These are questions that intrigued Target, the Minneapolis-based discount retailer, primed to launch a product line aimed at the college segment. In search of qualitative research that would elicit deep insights, emotions and motivations from college students, Target hired San Mateo, Calif.-based research firm Jump Associates. What Jump delivered was a different spin on the traditional focus group, exemplifying the type of creative, eclectic approach to qualitative research that's becoming increasingly popular. The research enabled Target to hear firsthand from college-bound students about their concerns when shopping for their dorm rooms and to get a sense from college students of what life in a dorm is like.

"We were fascinated with the underlying social dynamic of going to college," says Dev Patnaik, managing associate at Jump. So the firm sponsored a series of "game nights" at high school grads' homes, inviting incoming college freshman as well as students with a year of dorm living under their belts. (Each was paid an incentive, similar to a focus group participant.) To get teens talking about dorm life, Jump devised a board game that involved issues associated with going to college. The game naturally led to informal conversations - and questions - about college life. Jump researchers were on the sidelines to observe, while a video camera recorded the proceedings.

The research paid off. Last year, Target launched the Todd Oldham Dorm Room product line designed for college freshman. Among the new offerings: Kitchen in a Box, which provides basic accoutrements for a budding college cook; Bath in a Box, which includes an extra-large bath towel to preserve modesty on the trek to and from the shower; and a laundry bag with instructions on how to actually do the laundry printed on the bag. Thanks in part to the Dorm Room line, Target held its own during the back-to-school season. In the third quarter of 2002, when most of the year's back-to-school shopping for college students was done, revenues at Target stores increased 12 percent over the third quarter of 2001, to $8.4 billion, while comparable store sales increased by only 1 percent.

Patnaik calls the game night "the antidote to the traditional focus group," a process he views as "a customer terrarium, with people behind glass," much the same way plants and lizards are taken out of their natural surroundings and observed for scientific purposes. In Patnaik's view, traditional focus groups often make it impossible for market researchers to learn the truth about what customers are feeling. Still, many companies rely on focus groups, in which 8-to-12 people are gathered in a room that has a two-way mirror, to make their marketing decisions. But according to Patnaik, "Focus groups are the crack cocaine of market research. You get hooked on them, and you're afraid to make a move without them."

Whether or not focus groups are addictive, marketers are certainly heavy users. In 2001, companies spent $1.1 billion on qualitative research, most of this for focus groups, says Larry Gold, editor and publisher of Inside Research, a monthly publication based in Barrington, Ill., that tracks the market research industry. But in an era of rising expectations, qualitative research, especially focus groups, is increasingly under the gun. In fact, despite the proliferation of focus groups that are held prior to product launches, an astonishing 80 percent of all new products or services fail within six months or fall significantly short of projections, points out Harvard marketing professor Gerald Zaltman, in his new book, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

Of course, it's not reasonable to place the blame for these product failures squarely on the shoulders of traditional focus groups - but even those who conduct them admit that the method has room for improvement. Today, the field of qualitative research is changing, not only in response to its critics, but also to benefit from advancing technology and research methodology. Some are turning to cutting-edge segmentation science to ensure that they're studying the right group of respondents. Still others are taking a page from ethnographic research, creating focus group experiences that are less clinical and a lot more like real life. And as research from the 1990s, dubbed the decade of the brain, wends its way into the business world, cutting-edge qualitative researchers are opting for one-on-one interviews and borrowing cognitive science techniques, such as response latency and neuroimaging, to access emotions and feelings that consumers don't even know they're having. Qualitative researchers predict that such creative and effective approaches may ultimately leave the traditional construct of focus groups far behind.