BrainTrust Query: Death of the Focus Group
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion
is a summary of a current article from the Retail Prophet Consulting blog.
Consumer
research often attempts to predict future consumer behavior but the reality
is that consumers very often say things that don’t correspond at
all to what they eventually do in-store. In fact, there’s often a gaping
disconnect between a consumer’s needs as articulated in focus groups and
the basket of stuff that gets taken home from the store. If the two matched up
even the least bit closely, marketing would be a cinch, but they often don’t
and with good reason — consumers rarely have a clue why they do what they
do in stores! And in other cases, focus group participants simply don’t
tell the truth, which probably doesn’t come as any great shock.
What’s
been missing is what shoppers actually do in the store! This has largely been
the realm of anecdotal data and lab-based studies, both of which are often
highly inaccurate.
That’s where I believe mobile apps, near field communication,
location based services and other intelligent retail technologies are poised
to revolutionize our approach to consumer and shopper research. For the first
time ever, researchers will be able to connect the expressed needs of consumers
with their actual, physical path to purchase. Questions like where they go
in the store and where don’t
they go, where they stop and what they race right by will finally be precisely
answerable. What’s critical is that marketers can view this kind of information
in aggregate according to what thousands of consumers do, not simply within
a narrow and controlled study group.
But understanding the consumer’s
physical path is only one of the new streams of data. The other and more important
stream will reveal what they actually engaged and interacted within the space.
Which in-store marketing messages did they connect with and for how long? Which
coupons did they download? Which products did they scan but put back without
buying? Marketers will see where consumers required more or less information
to make a decision and perhaps even when they compared prices with competitors
before deciding. Even insights on how different ages, sexes and races move
through a given retail environment are entirely possible.
Finally marketers
can validate the reams of data they currently collect with credible information
on the consumer’s actual in-store behavior. This
presents a whole new world of opportunity to give retail consumers what they
want — potentially
without ever once asking them. It’s also a chance to better understand
the gap between what consumers say and what they do.
In fact, it’s entirely
possible that this new ability to validate in-store consumer behavior will
render front and back end consumer surveys a thing of the past.
Discussion Questions
How will access to consumer insights from mobile technologies affect traditional consumer research methods such as focus groups and surveys?
Very simply–these technologies allow real-time tracking of consumer behavior unavailable through any other means and vastly superior to manual tracking processes such as reviewing security video or posting undercover behavior experts in stores. A retailer can quickly collect data about actual behavior of customers across the country or globe, at a minimum sort it by regional factors, and get a much more accurate picture of what consumers actually want than they’ll get from a focus group. Focus groups will still remain valuable in verticals such as fast food where customers are relatively restricted in their actions.
People have been predicting the demise of the focus group since we started using scanner data in the 1980s–it’s still around and serves a useful purpose in the researcher’s tool box. We’ve had in-store observational technology for some time and some of it is very good–I’m thinking of a company called Videomining as one example. Peter Fader’s work with store paths has also shown some interesting shopping phenomena.
Is mobile going to change the face of research? Not very likely. Whether we get data from an RFID shopping cart or a mobile phone is not very different from a research perspective. Retailers already know where people go and don’t go–we’ve not seen any examples of new insights on this topic. And I would bet that most of us could design high stopping-power displays–that doesn’t mean they are practical financially. There is less to this information than we might expect on the surface and mobile is not a radically new way to collect it.
I’ve been trying to move my clients out of focus groups–or at least traditional focus groups–for what seems like a lifetime. If there were no alternatives, I still favor abandoning focus groups.
That said, new technologies and the creative use of social media can get us a much clearer picture of what consumers are likely to actually do–in the present and in the future.
I do think we need to spend some more time thinking about less invasive ways of polling consumers. Marketers still find the siren call of manipulation hard to refuse. Real understanding isn’t based on any system of the manipulation of forced choices. To get real consumer insight you first need to start thinking like a consumer yourself.
Doug, Excellent article but, in a sense, hardly news. “Watch what they do, not what they say” has been a key principle of software usability for decades and a key theme for usability experts like Jakob Nielsen. For the various reasons you have mentioned, consumers generally don’t do what they say. So whether you are building software, workflows or merchandising programs, it is essential to watch customers. You can do this in person or electronically. The “science” behind usability is even more rigid. You usually give the user a high level task (“purchase product X from brand Y”), watch and record everything they do. You watch and record, but you don’t assist. What seems “obvious” to you, often isn’t to your customers. The results, as anyone who has observed such tests, are VERY insightful and humbling. I would argue the same methodology can be used for better understanding customer behaviours in the context of retail merchandising.
I agree that consumers have traditionally shared misinformation in surveys and focus groups. For example, a consumer may state that they want more product variety in a store’s assortment, however their actual buying habits show that they don’t take advantage of the additional range of items in their shopping trips.
However, I also believe that surveys still hold value in identifying trends in shopping behavior. When a scientific, statistically-valid sampling is measured, I have seen overall trends in likes, dislikes, needs and wants emerge to paint a picture of true consumer characteristics that retailers and CPGers can respond to and proactively manage their businesses around.
The focus group has been the research everyone loves to hate for as long as anyone can recall.
While I agree that mobile technologies will provide a new vehicle for shopper insights, they are more likely to add to the options than replace traditional methods.
The advent of shopper card data, virtual research, and RFID tracking were all touted as replacements of “antiquated” methods. Instead, they tend to add new weapons to the traditional arsenal and expand our capabilities.
Mobile devices and other technology will help retailers document consumer behavior as it is going on. They do not transform the ability to “predict” behavior. It’s more like looking at behavior through a rear view mirror.
There are ways to test marketing options before there is a commitment to a final investment. You can ask me for the details if you’d like. But it does cost some money…a bit more than a focus group or two. For serious marketers who wish to avoid the bigger risk of finding out something doesn’t work after in store placement there is an opportunity to pre-test.
Good points all around. One more to consider: focus groups have been misused by those who think they can conduct research into human behavior outside the room in a focus group. As a result, many folks are skeptical of them (like Ryan Mathews who is rarely skeptical).
Properly designed and conducted, focus groups can provide valuable information about perceptions, reactions, usage, issues–things like that. But even within those narrow areas there are limits. I get a kick out of people who want to ask questions about price. I tell them not to waste their time and give them the answer right away.
I’ve never been a fan of focus groups. Even if they did tell the truth and even if the participants were thoughtful enough to provide usable insights, they represent a statistically insignificant percentage of the shopping population, skewed towards individuals who, well, like going to focus groups.
Mobile technology will continue to evolve and will no doubt provide some useful information. However, there is a huge resource that’s already in place, but is seldom used–the store associates. They are in the stores interacting with and observing customers every single day. And yet, there are very few retail organizations that take advantage of this resource. Some that do, like Bed Bath & Beyond for instance, reap huge rewards. In the late ’90s, Bed Bath and Linens ‘N Things had the same revenue and market cap. Bed Bath made their store organization an integral part of their decision-making. Linens didn’t. In 5 years, they were doing twice the volume of Linens and had a market cap that was 12x of Linens. Bed Bath is still here. Linens isn’t.
Want a great focus group? Have one with your field organization.
Focus groups still have their place if they are planned and executed for the right purposes and to accomplish the right objectives.
Mobile technology and the apps that have and will continue arrive to help markers understand consumer behavior is great. We do however need to be careful and not look at this data as the whole truth, only a part of a very large puzzle called consumer behavior. Data can be collected from so many points, POS systems, mobile apps, panel, RFID, survey data and the list goes on. When you combine these disparate data sets you get closer to the whole truth. Do you ever arrive? No, you can just get closer. Something will always be missing in the data to truly give you a 100% understanding of the consumer and their behavior and that is okay.
I am glad to see mobile technology will help marketers. I just hope they don’t abandon other methods of understanding the consumer, but rather add this new data set to what they already have so they can get closer to 100%.
Doug suggests a valuable solution to a vexing research problem. It’s puzzling to see paradoxes such as 80% of purchase decisions are made in-store (from an NRF presentation cited last week) and 80% of purchase decisions are made pre-store (SymphonyIRI). We either don’t really know or we need to better understand this elusive 160% of shoppers.
Mobile research can increase the “n” cost efficiently. It can absolutely serve as an alternative to focus groups for certain questions. This holds a lot of promise.
To round out our understanding of the shopper, we ideally need to address the gaps of mobile-derived data. Research that captures other inputs, perhaps just annually, helps us understand why, what and who. Here a few ways to supplement:
*Pre-shopping behavior to help understand the trip (e.g., digital media viewed, lists made)
*Observations to clarify being near a stimulus and interacting with it
*Intercepts to ask shoppers why they did what they did and what they perceived
*Purchase history to ascertain what they bought (ideally compared to past behavior and supplemented with cross-channel panel data)
*Geo-demographics other retailer-desired segment data for representativeness
A multi-touchpoint research approach is admittedly ideal, and perhaps even unreasonable in many cases. But so is trying to know what happens 160% of the time.
While it is true the new technologies allow rapid data mining, focus groups are still very viable when one is introducing a new product or simply want consumer reaction to visual or auditory cues. You can’t see the expression of the customer whose scan you just caught….
We try to apply quantitative (numbers) as well as qualitative (behavior) findings to our consumer research. They work together to deliver the real picture for our clients.
Marketers need to be careful when they predict that something will bite the dust. We predict Borders, for example, who just filed Chap 11 this week (another feature in today’s RetailWire), will reinvent itself differently from a “bookseller.” Maybe focus groups can also be reinvented to become more relevant to today’s new consumer/technologies.
Focus groups have their flaws for sure. But that doesn’t mean they have no value. A good moderator can stimulate discussion and follow up on comments. There are nuggets of shopper insight from those groups even if not all of it is an totally accurate reflection of shopper behavior in stores.
Then there are the new technologies such as in-store measurement of shopper behavior (a poster mentioned VideoMining, for example). They obviously provide a totally accurate picture of what is going on in the aisles. They should work in tandem with focus groups to give retailers and marketers a fuller view and understanding of shopper behavior.
Meanwhile, I don’t agree with the article’s statement that “consumers rarely have a a clue why they do what they do in stores.” That notion is about as accurate as the tired cliche that 70% of purchase decisions are made in the store.
The average grocery shopping trip takes about 20 minutes nowadays. Shoppers know the store layout and typically follow the same path to products. They typically buy the same favorite brands (or choose from a set of favorite brands) for repeat purchases. In other words, they pretty much know where they are going in the store and what they want to buy.
The changes that take place are a result of creative and compelling merchandising, promotions like sampling, special displays, and so forth. Observing and analyzing these changes to typical shopper behavior provides real value.
As shopping apps enter the store, interesting and revealing consumer data points will become the basis for a new range of shopper analytics. For example what if the shopper pauses to access a shopper app to secure more product information? This event indicates a shortcoming in the retail store’s presentation or sales coverage. Merging this event with actual POS transaction information will signal the degree to which just-in-time product information influences the sale.
Another fascinating touch point is tracking the Dressing Room interaction. If the shopper tries on an item, but does not actually buy it, quality problems might be indicated. Items with high conversion rates will indicate high performing items.
Focus groups are helpful in the product development area. But focus groups are a crutch for lazy management at retail. When management won’t take the time to walk the floors and talk to the customers, when management will not train employees, when management will not properly manage the business by going to the trouble of hiring the very best personnel, the a focus group won’t help.
Good article, really exiting about what is coming ahead in research, it looks fantastic but…although consumer and shopper are intertwined, research techniques are not necessary the same. Focus groups are not dead for development of new products (consumer), but they are indeed not appropriate for shopper research.
Mobile data is sorely lacking the most important factor: Why?
I’ve sent 20 years changing advertising to cause immediate results. And what we never learn without qualitative research is the underlying motivation. As a result, observing mobile data is like reading the fossil record–all we can observe is what we happened to track. And the fossil record shows also what we will begin to encounter: constantly morphing theories what the mobile/fossils mean. None of it will be truly accurate.
And through it all, the wise ones will continue to rely first and foremost on data that helps us see motivation. Because that’s the only handle that can dramatically change profitability.
So bring it on! Mobile data offers opportunity for some fun analysis (assuming consumers play along and do our jobs for us by taking the steps to become trackable). But power will continue to come primarily from traditional methods.
Implicit in this thread is that no research technique is perfect, human behavior isn’t entirely logical and any single technique monolithically applied won’t work.
I remember when I first got into product marketing we’d use focus groups for EVERYTHING but by the time you got to the last rounds you’d already sold the product in and had a ship date so any negative feedback you got was deep sixed as it was too late to make a change.
Focus groups are a decent “top of the funnel” approach when you know nothing and you’re trying to get grounded. They are less helpful as a key to understanding human behavior since, as many have said, people often don’t understand why they do what they do. Every research technique has its flaw and we already have more data as an industry than we’re able to effectively action.
I would call for a research plan that lays out “what we need to know,” “what stages of the funnel we’re trying to address,” and “how much data we need to get there.” Many brands who formed online communities discovered they didn’t have enough to say to keep them running on a permanent basis but that the communities could be episodically very helpful. Knowing what we don’t know, what we need to know, and how to get there as efficiently and effectively as possible will keep the data streams manageable, the privacy concerns less pressing and the ability to action what we learn a whole lot higher.
Focus groups are certainly not dead. Granted there are numerous other alternatives to seeking input from stakeholders (and our firm uses them all). But for certain projects and certain outcomes, nothing beats a good, old-fashioned focus group where you can look into the eyes and hear the unspoken words of those from which you are hoping to glean insights.
Focus Groups have always been an easy-to-misuse tool. They are a valid means to get consumer insights and help develop new hypothesis to test and try, but all too often their output is treated as as data/evidence/validation, which it is not. Cognitive Psychology and Neuromarketing have completely debunked any insight tool that asks the consumer why they made a decision, or how they would behave in the future. Our brains are simply not wired to be aware of the majority of factors that influence our decisions, and we’re even worse about predicting how we’ll act/decide/feel in the future (Read Predicted Irrationality or The Buying Brain for examples).
As Doug rightly points out, we are seeing more and more innovations in retail environments that let us collect real data about shopper behavior. Mobile and micro-geolocation will be huge for sure, but already in-place are tons of interactive displays that count individual shopper interactions. Want to know how many digital cameras per hour are shopped at a Best Buy? What order the phones are tried in a T-Mobile Store? That data is already available to business users in both organizations. The latest generation of CCD based loss-prevention cameras have amazing customer insight capabilities as well. The days of Envirosell having to Velcro dozens of cameras onto store shelves are coming to an end.
But what I find fascinating is that merchants don’t actually know what to do with all this new data (yet). Just because you know the decision making funnel for digital cameras in a Best Buy, doesn’t mean you will deviate from all the business processes that were handed down to your from your predecessor. Business users are going to need to learn (and trust) how to use the new insights to do their jobs differently, and that turns out to be harder than collecting the insights.
This is an area where shopper marketers that focus on the online channel (where the behavior funnel has been available much longer) are way ahead. The online analytics tools are so much better, that I don’t understand why vendors aren’t building store traffic meters that talk to Google Analytics, Coremetrics, and Omniture yet.
I don’t think I agree with the basic premise of this article; we’ve always had a measure of WHAT people buy–it’s called “sales”–it’s the WHY they do it that focus groups seek to answer. I don’t think more intrusive…er, sophisticated methods of following people’s actions changes that.
As a qualitative research consultant for 15 years, I do not agree with calls to end focus group research. If focus groups are done the right way, the method can uncover many great and meaningful insights on the topic at hand. It can also, sometimes more importantly, bring attention to issues clients did not know they had or did not understand. Qualitative research, for me, can be summed up in three powerful words – –ASK, EXPLORE, UNDERSTAND.
Mobile technologies and tracking methods certainly have their place. They can provide real-time data on what happened, but not why it happened. I don’t think you can get to understanding without actually talking to and/or observing customers/consumers first hand. Yes, numbers and data points are important tangible measures, but without context, they remain very flat and static. They provide a snapshot of behavior. I think it is important for companies to go deeper.
I’m surprised that nobody here recommended the TTSIYS method: Try To Shop In Your Store. Enter your own store with a wish list, and see if the store can successfully sell to you. Regardless of the other tools you use, here’s no substitute for real live shopping.
In our uber-connected individualist world, the role of live focus groups is changing. No longer are they the only way to speak with shoppers. We’ve gotten fantastic insights from 1:1 communication ranging from in-store ethnography to mobile text messaging vehicles. Virtual shops can be combined with e-intercepts to probe shoppers about the whys. Improved computer graphics, consumer comfort with technology and faster upload times makes it easier to probe the softer side on line.
All that said, there is a nuance that we’ve yet to seen felt better than through group dialogue. That dialogue just might happen in different ways–small groups walking stores, shoppers doing independent store visits and keeping diaries to then share in a blog, and of course ongoing online communities that really are high tech, longitudinal focus groups. Yes, there are more toys in the toybox but we still play with our old favorite focus groups often.
New research vectors are far more likely to displace, not replace old ones. I don’t think focus groups and other qualitative methods should, or will, go away. Neither will quantitative surveys, despite their limitations (such as response bias).
Direct measurement of shopper behavior (using mobile phone, video surveillance or brain implants) is certainly desirable to marketers and merchants. Tracking shopper paths, dwell times, product choice, message response and linking that data to actual sales should eventually reveal some causal links that are truly useful.
But watching behavior tells us little about awareness and influences that shoppers are exposed to prior to visiting the store. What they do and what they think are two different, although connected, quantities. Assembling a comprehensive picture that gets us to “why” will require many kinds of observations and research techniques.
Digital tools will make some of this faster and cheaper. Use of older research methods may shift somewhat, due to budget limitations, if nothing else. But this all pre-supposes that shoppers will tolerate our intrusions into their lives in the name of relevancy.
“But understanding the consumer’s physical path is only one of the new streams of data.”
Since we invented PathTracker® ten years ago, and have since tracked millions of shopping trips on a second by second basis in dozens of stores, it is odd that anyone would conceive of this as being a “new stream of data.” Oh well! 😉
(Here come those darn turkeys again.)
Mobile technologies, social networking, multidimensional market segmentations–there is lots going on in market research that is new and exciting. But don’t discount the traditional focus group just yet.
As a research provider, I sometimes feel like I’m being perceived as archaic when I recommend focus groups to clients. But in many cases, they are still the best methodology. Exciting they are not. But they sometimes get the job done.
There is nothing like an in-person group for generating discussion, vetting product concepts, and getting consensus among 8 to 10 people. Focus groups are not for every situation. But no researcher would want to be without them in his or her toolbox.
It’s clear that having insights into how consumers make purchase decisions in store and what they actually end up buying will significantly increase the reliability of overall consumer research, which today relies overwhelmingly on consumers’ claimed behavior.
However, it is critical that the foundation needs to start from the actual purchase behavior of all consumers instead of the information from the select few who ‘opt-in’ to provide information about their ‘path to purchase’ through the tracking tools described in the article. A high reliance on an ‘opt-in’ population might bring some of the biases we observe in traditional surveys.
We do not believe traditional surveys would be obsolete in any circumstance–the traditional qualitative and quantitative work might actually gain more business value as they would provide a complete, end-to-end consumer picture by pinpointing the ‘why’ behind what the consumers actually did in store during their ‘path to purchase’.
So, we propose starting from actual purchase behavior, understand what it took to end up with that behavior in store for different consumer segments and then pick the segments of consumers that matter most to the business to identify the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ they have done. This is possible already! The shiny new tools are great and we are leveraging them too, but without the right foundation to build on (and an approach that is based in understanding consumers not understanding marketing levers) they may not live up to the hopes being set-out.
Certainly not and all or nothing approach. There is not one research methodology/tool that will serve everyone’s purposes. What is important is that companies understand the benefits and limits to each…whether old or new. I do agree that there is a big difference between what a customer say they do vs. what they actually do. But that does not mean that focus groups are dead or should not be used. Case in point, Shopper intercepts (talking to customers based off of an observed behavior in the store) can help fill in the gaps as to where a focus group leaves off. One does not replace the other. As far as new technology…all very exciting. I am sure some will play a key role in helping understand and improve the customer experience, but doubt (like history has taught us) one will be the silver bullet.
Just a quick note to thank everyone for an outstanding array of comments and perspectives.
I suppose if there’s one thing we can all agree on it’s that it’s dangerous to assume that anything we know and value today will be as relevant and useful tomorrow. Disruption is around every corner and to some extent, we can only capitalize once we’re OK with that.
Thanks again for all your enlightening perspectives.
One company on the radar right now that’s already in the market to provide local awareness via smartphones is Zapiddy (www.zapiddy.com). Retailers and CPGs can ask their customers for specific information or photos while they’re on location, rather than after the fact. It has an interesting tie-in to charity, too. I think we are going to see more players in this space recognizing that real time intelligence can be gathered by the armies of customers who carry smartphone technology.
It’s important to differentiate between consumer analytics; which new technology will allow to be done faster and better, and consumer insights; which can be the results of a variety of research methods including focus groups.
Focus groups are another way to understand consumer insights and behavior–by age, shopping patterns, gender etc., on a variety of topics. We need to remember that not everyone uses apps. User preferences representing a variety of demographics are important. And that includes focus groups, consumer research, loyalty data, and new technologies.