Why everyone loves to hate Focus Groups

Definition of Qualitative to date

To define Qualitative today, it is useful to look at the definition that was being used in the 20^th Century, the second half of which saw significant growth of qualitative in popularity, particularly in the US and UK.

“Qualitative research is usually exploratory or diagnostic.  It answers questions such as What, Why or How but it cannot answer the question How Many and it is centrally concerned with understanding things rather than measuring them” (Source : An Introduction to Qualitative Market Research. Mike Imms and Gill Ereaut)  

“Qualitative research involves small samples of people which are not necessarily representative of larger populations; it employs a wide variety of techniques to collect data, not simply a structured question and answer format; it relies on interpretation of the findings which is an integral part of the data collection and indeed begins well before the fieldwork commences at the briefing.  It allows access to the ways in which consumers express themselves” (Source : GoodThinking, Wendy Gordon, 1999)

As Qualitative practitioners at Ipsos, we know that its purpose and value to marketers has been its ability to uncover fresh, unexpected and in depth learnings that help identify, create and maintain a distinct point of difference for their innovations and brand and communication propositions.

Frankly, times have changed and we are now facing a very different world in 2017.

The world has become more complex

With the increase in marketing noise and the challenge marketers have to break through, cutting through the complexity is a real challenge. The average supermarket contains 48,000 products and each person is exposed to 5,000 + advertisement and brand exposures per day per person*.  It is impossible for people to recall what they saw/ what influenced them and for that to reflect anything but a perception of the reality.  Approaches that include contextual experiences that encourage people to describe, reflect or just live out their real life experience help address this complexity.

People are talking – so we can now listen

In the land of Big Data, n=1 has power.  Whether it comes from social media, in store sales data, customer feedback or any number of Big Data sources, we have access to people’s unfiltered thoughts and feelings about their experiences with brands and products that were just not available to us in the 20^th Century.

Furthermore, Neuroscience and Behavioural Science have revealed how people make decisions, the shortcuts, the biases and the ‘mistakes’ we make every day – this knowledge has shed light not only on the world of marketing but also on the way we do research. Behaviour drives attitude much more than we thought.

The challenge still exists to connect the dots and make meaning from this data in a way that can be actioned – but we no longer have to rely only on asking questions to get answers about people’s aspirations and motivations.

*Media Dynamics, 2014

People have become impatient (clients AND consumers!)

Technology is disrupting and revolutionising business & the way we live, whether that is how we book a cab or a hotel room; how we shop and make purchase decisions; how we listen to music or how we pay for things. It is now largely done online in a seamless, speedy and often cheaper way. Uber-connected consumers are increasingly comfortable expressing themselves online and want to do it at a time that they choose.  Not necessarily Real Time – Qualitative needs to be Right Time.

Qualitative research has historically felt like a slow process – and in the past, has not been cheap. The future of Qual must align with the zeitgeist and the increasing pace of decision making that is now happening in client organisations.

So we now find ourselves in a world where we need something that reflects our new reality, fast and with substance (making meaning out of that Big Data).

The old definition of Qualitative is neither right, nor wrong – but it does need to evolve to reflect this changing landscape, the ever moving needs of clients and our greater understanding of how people make decisions.

Definition of Qualitative 2017

PWC (2016) has said that the role of Qualitative is to " interrogate big data and convert it into smart data."  Essentially, to reconnect the marketer with the person behind the data in order to turn that data into action. We would agree. However, to achieve this qualitative has to be more than a few groups and depth interviews.

In reality, Qualitative permeates into other areas more than ever; the principles and capabilities we have developed are now the norm in many other professions - co-creation, brainstorming, workshopping, design thinking. It is so much more than a few groups and depth interviews.

We might even suggest we drop the word ‘RESEARCH’ and call it Qualitative THINKING or DISCOVERY or ENQUIRY and expand the definition as follows:

1. Not only RESEARCH but IMMERSION
   Qualitative is also a way, for all business stakeholders (not only CMI and marketing people), to build empathy with the people who buy and use their products.  This in turn enables them to anticipate needs and communicate and connect more relevantly.
2. Not only QUESTIONING but OBSERVING…
   Predominantly driven by verbal questioning (albeit indirect), there has always been a gap between what people ‘say’ in a social environment and what people actually do when in ‘autopilot’.  Observation allows us to understand unconscious behaviours and routines, and situational effects in the moment of use or purchase.
3. Not just ASKING but LISTENING
   Listening to spontaneous online conversations or free discussions between participants provides a chance to discover learnings we did not even know we did not know.
4. Not only PASSIVE DATA but ACTIVE CURATION
   A single data set, viewed alone, gives one view of the world. A qualitative mind-set and approach can help connect the dots between different data sources and partner with marketing teams along their innovation and communication funnel to help them use these multiple sources to create fresh strategic avenues to pursue.

Ipsos UU Point of Distinction in Qualitative

Why do we do Qualitative? Bringing Life to life – in everything we do we try to illustrate and illuminate the world around us, breathing life into our research insights.

How do we do Qualitative? We believe in HOT and COLD Qualitative with REAL people in REAL life

Hot Qualitative is about experience – being there in-context with people, as life happens. We want clients to experience the joys, fears, desires and tensions that their target consumers experience.   And when we can't be there, we recreate that experience so clients can feel the insight, and empathise with people.  Hot thinking is about pushing people out of their comfort zones to get at raw, instinctive, intuitive insights.  We make people forget they are in research for a more real response.  We use gamification, deprivation, conflict to recreate context, as well as techniques such as Virtual Reality.

Cold thinking is about making sense of the HOT; taking what you capture in the heat of the moment and evaluating it in the cold light of day. We use Ipsos' proprietary analytical frameworks – for example around innovation, communication or shopping behaviour.  Cold helps you take action with what you have seen in the HOT. It gets buy-in. It gets solutions. It is intelligent and strategic.

We believe every qualitative initiative should combine both Hot and Cold thinking at every stage –design, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis, presentation and reporting.

What do we do in Qualitative?

Our focus in qualitative at Ipsos is on reinventing Observation, Listening, Curation and Activation to help our clients experience living insights that will help them grow their business

Observation is about being there in-context, as life happens.  We always want to be there when a person encounters a problem and to watch how they try to solve it.   This may include Ethnography, Immersions, mobile or a simple consumer connect for example.

Listening is about accessing the spontaneous online discourse on social media and blogs; about creating conversations where people can interact spontaneously and naturally; occasionally fuelling them with gamification.

Curation is about uncovering, interpreting, contextualising and socialising intelligence from multiple sources, as part of an ongoing living breathing ecosystem, fuelled regularly by hackathons and workshops.

Activation is about strengthening the connection between the insight and the decision maker to make sure research informs and inspires business decisions.

With everything we do, we embrace technology as an enabler whenever it makes sense: mobile to collect in-context experiences, a purpose-built platform to socialise curated insights, Text Analytics and AI to make sense of social media and other data, pop-up or long term communities of people with similar interests at the ready, Virtual and Augmented Reality to recreate environments and stimulus. We will never stop innovating with technology as we constantly bring Life to life.

So why the big fuss about Focus Groups?

‘Focus group’ has become a term of disdain - journalists and politicians delight in blaming them for all the evils of the world; a dirty word that embodies the worst of groupthink and a lack of conviction. The research industry has turned against the focus group with a vengeance – but is this justified? Well frankly yes. Focus groups became the lazy, safe choice of the tick box school of research. They were overused and formulaic. But that’s not the whole story – bad groups are bad, good groups are good.

By 2015, less than 50% of Ipsos UU’s qualitative work was traditional focus groups and in depth interviews and this trend towards alternative ways of gaining an in depth understanding of consumer motivations, attitudes and behaviour continues.

We believe there are three things driving this:

1. Our need to capture consumers’ experience – the instinctive, intuitive, ‘system 1’ thinking and behaviours and not only the more purposeful, reflective, System 2 attitudes that people express.
2. The need for clients to be immersed in people’s lives, to experience and build deeper empathy with people in order to connect their products and brands more closely to them in a highly competitive business environment.
3. Clients’ frustration with traditional focus groups to deliver fresh insight to ongoing challenges and the time and cost often associated with in person research, particularly in international research combined with the availability of a plethora of alternative ways to observe, listen and curate to meet clients’ business questions

Let’s face it: Traditional focus groups just aren’t cutting it anymore.

• It is this word ‘traditional’ that is so important.  Ipsos UU is also not interested in the ‘traditional’ focus group: having people sit in an artificial environment, stick their hands up when asked whether they like something, asked to remember things they did ‘in the past three months’, while clients look on behind a two-way mirror.

• This sort of questioning yields, at best, superficial and, at worst, useless responses. Clients are frustrated because they learn ‘nothing new’ from such poorly moderated, question driven sessions and rightfully look for alternative ways of engaging with people to address their qualitative objectives.

• We should make the distinction between traditional focus groups and all other types of face to face interactions with more than one person – the Ipsos UU way - and we should drop the term focus group (for e.g. interactive group discussions) as it has been loaded with such bad and limiting connotations.

Are groups always bad?

Although individual face to face (particularly against the context of Big (usually anonymous) data) remains a premium research environment, group dynamics (whether offline or online) are central to society and influences – now so more than ever - and these are replicable in a research environment. We are herd animals and the connections between us are as important as the people themselves. The way thinking and behaviour is influenced in a group dynamic tells us a lot about how to nudge.

Groups are dynamic, iterative, comparative and generative. Through the ebb and flow of argument, group discussions hold both hot and cold elements and allow us to decode behaviour through unpeeling the layers of truth around complex beings and influences.

This group dynamic can be replicated and reflected in so many different environments other than the traditional ‘viewing facility’ – for example in context; in a highly engaged online community; as a tribe.

The group dynamic can reveal HOT insights that are borne from conflict, gamification, play, creativity, ideation. These HOT insights should always be married with COLD thinking in a combination of methodologies and analytical frameworks.

We have moved significantly beyond ‘Traditional focus groups” and gamified them, adding in new projectives to become a very creative way to find inspiration by delving into the hidden emotions of a group. The location may involve an art gallery or an Airbnb house. The client may be involved in the session, not sitting behind a mirror. Intentional friction may be included to get at underlying emotions. Participants may be taken out of the group one-by-one to answer specific questions to a video camera in a separate room.

We must be exceptionally careful of who participates in the groups, equally careful of how the discussion is managed and our moderators must be experts in interpreting the meaning behind the discussion.

Essentially, it is the free flow of debate, the interchange of ideas and their inherent flexibility of the approach that makes them compelling – with a suitable contemporary evolution that has been outlined above.

And the case for doing something else…

We must remember that focus groups were invented before we had the ability to engage with people online, before people had smartphones, before we understood as much as we do now about how people make (irrational) decisions.

Behaviour and the context of decision making has become significantly more important to understand than just the words people say and if we rely on just this one dimension to understand why people do what they do, we are missing a huge piece of the puzzle. Immersing, observing, listening and curating are the keys of the future.

So should we ban focus groups forever? Let’s ban bad focus groups forever: the boring, safe, traditional ones. When we look at a qualitative brief, we shouldn’t default to a focus group. We can keep the good Interactive Group Discussions when it’s right, but let’s embrace other solutions – mobile, immersive, longitudinal, community based, peer to peer, passive, active, gamified – there is an enchanting plethora of other ways we can experience consumer insight and help bring Life to life.