Focus Groups Are a Waste of Time

I’m sure I’ll get some old-school marketers to vehemantly deny the truth of this fact, but focus groups are a waste of time. To be more specific, if you’re looking for honest feedback, or real world testing, don’t waste your time and sandwiches on focus groups. If you’re looking to cover your ass with your client, water down your campaign, turn your product into a toy, make deli runs, play with a video camera, by all means: assemble your group.

There are reasons why focus groups are a waste of time:

Real World It’s Not – unless your product is meant to be used in a conference room by overly critical office workers who probably have no interest in it, a focus group is far from a real world consumer/product interaction.

Group Dynamics – anyone who has taken a sociology or psychology class knows that when you put someone in a strange environment with strangers, they will not be themselves. Some will clam up, play stupid, some will try to dominate the group, even say the opposite of what they think. You will see hyper-critical feedback, even negative solely based on the fact that they’ve been asked to judge.

Inappropriate Audience – if Steve Jobs had sat down a group of people to steer development of the iPod, we’d still be using a discman. Chances are that most focus groups do not represent your target audience. Even if they do, they may dislike your product simply because they’ve never seen it or their cool friends don’t gave one. Focus groups don’t take into account influencers.

Education – if you are good at what you do; experienced, talented, skilled, educated: why do you need a roomful of people that have nothing to do for lunch telling you how to redesign your product or reshoot your commercial?

Crowdsourcing – the Internet will give you much more honest feedback, in quantity. Launch your campaign or product, see what people are saying about it and how they are using it, then build that into version 2.

Examples of focus group decisions:
New Tropicana packaging
New Pepsi logo

Examples of not using focus groups:
Twitter
iPod

Thoughts?