the new science of focus groups

American Demographics, March 1, 2003

JUST you AND i

Some qualitative researchers are turning away from groups entirely. Gerry Katz, executive vice president of Applied Marketing Science, in Waltham, Mass., says that for new-product development, one-on-one interviews are more valuable than group interviews in obtaining fresh insights. Katz says that when a company conducts "voice of the customer" research for new product development, searching for wants and needs not yet met in the marketplace, the goal is to hear something new - and group dynamics can often make that difficult. (He points to a 1993 study by Abbie Griffin and John Hauser, published in the journal Marketing Science, that compared focus groups to one-on-one interviews. Griffin and Hauser found that, hour for hour, individual interviews elicited more useful comments.)

Zaltman, at Harvard, is also a fan of the one-on-one interview. He believes that one-on-one interviews are better poised to take advantage of the cutting edge of cognitive science. He's highly skeptical about consumers' ability to report on their decision-making process accurately - or on the true state of their emotions. Zaltman argues that consumers rarely are rational when making decisions, that they rely far more on emotions than on rational thinking when they decide what to buy. Further, he maintains that consumers can't really describe their decision-making process because they "have far less access to their mental activities than marketers give them credit for - 95 percent of thinking takes place in the unconscious mind." (For more on Zaltman's approach, see "The Power of Images" in American Demographics, Nov. 2001.) In his view, self-reported descriptions of a decision-making process may provide next to no insight into what actually motivated that person to behave in a certain way.

Zaltman believes that smart companies will start to exploit the advances made in the 1990s in physiological and psychological research. Market researchers can now study the movements of subjects' pupils, for example, to gain a window into unconscious emotions, and can measure the lag time in responses to questions, known as "latency response," to gain useful insights. On the frontier is the use of neuroimaging in market research. By hooking people up to a magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) and showing them advertisements, researchers could visually track bloodflow to the parts of the brain associated with positive or negative emotions, or the parts of the brain associated with memory, and get a more accurate read on how the participants are feeling and whether they will remember an advertisement.

This doesn't mean that scientific advances and whizbang technology will put focus groups out of business. Even Zaltman concedes that "there are circumstances where I think focus groups are warranted." For example, he says that if you want to learn the vocabulary a group of consumers uses to describe an experience or if you want to know about how word-of-mouth operates, focus groups are appropriate. "But you shouldn't use focus group to get in-depth insights," he says. Since focus groups typically run two hours and involve 10 people, he argues that each person gets only 12 minutes of time. "You can't get very far - you can't get very much depth - in 12 minutes with any one individual," Zaltman says. And since depth is the goal, the group approach that has been a fixture in marketing research for the past six decades may go the way of the dinosaur.