LARRY RYAN,
Sir, - I felt Laura Slattery's article on focus groups (Business This Week, February 21st) gave a misleading impression of their scope, use and basis. As a long-term practitioner, buyer and user of qualitative research, I am sensitive to the common journalistic misconceptions about it.
Focus groups entered the media vocabulary during the run of the 1980s American drama series Thirtysomething. In almost every episode the same eight Connecticut soccer moms pontificated about everything from beer to politics to station wagons in a focus group. Far-reaching decisions stemmed from their observations, and marketing fortunes were made and lost based on their pithy, Delphic musings.
Political leaders took to the qualitative research discipline with fervour thereafter, and Messrs Blair and Clinton reportedly adopted this marketing discipline as one of their key tools of political spin and polish.
In real life, however, the focus group remains a mere tool by which we can learn about why people think, act and spend as they do. It is rare that such groups are used to generate or create marketing strategies or advertising ideas, though they help people in these industries (and of course, politicians) to assess how their endeavours may be judged and interpreted by the public.
Research groups are rarely like the dramatised version in Thirtysomething. It would be laughable to run a single group in any context and more normal to run four, six or eight groups. Groups never last for just an hour, but commonly two or more hours. What is said is rarely taken as gospel. A trained facilitator evaluates the responses from an array of groups before judging why people reacted in a certain way, and what was meant by what participants said or did not say. Groups should be used as a means of tapping the creativity and lateral thinking of diverse groups of people, and rarely as the final arbiter of whether an advertisement or idea works or fails.
The point of qualitative research is to add the voice of the consumer to developmental and evaluative decisions. Where it becomes of greater import it is probable that the research is being misused for political reasons, or was conceived as a crutch to justify the pre-existing opinions of weak-willed and over-reactive management. - Yours, etc., LARRY RYAN, Director,
Behaviour & Attitudes Marketing Research, Burlington Road, Dublin 4.