Hitting the target market

Malcolm Burgess on how the focus groups decide what we want, and how you can help reach that decision

LOVE them or loathe them, you can't avoid them. Whether it's the latest instant custard, Belgium as a holiday destination or New Labour, you can safely blame a focus group (also known as brand image or qualitative research) for giving the final seal of approval.

Where the marketers responsible for a new product or launch made their mistake in the past was in assuming that all this consumer information could be obtained by a woman in an anorak with a clipboard asking you annoying questions outside Dorothy Perkins. They realised that we needed to be paid in order to say the right things and to be placed in more comfortable homelike surroundings. That's why focus group meetings are often held in advertising agency rooms that resemble a cross between Richard and Judy's studio set and the MFI catalogue, with some emergency stencilling thrown in. You'll only be able to join the focus group, of course, if you represent the "target market". This basically means that if you're lower class you get to rap about products that will reduce your life expectancy, while everybody else gets "aspirational" goods and services - ie, things you can't afford. In any case, you're getting paid for it and you obviously have a lot of free time on your hands, so you only have yourself to blame. Fortunately food and drink is provided too, it's just bad luck if you happen to be in the new tropical flavour Complan group. As far as saying something goes, you could be so gobsmacked by the new product that further discussion is impossible - "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!", for example, was allegedly the last orgasmic gasp of a focus grouper quite overwhelmed at the prospect of enhanced margarine. But usually group discussion is a more prolonged although not necessarily more articulate affair. Researchers will want to facilitate group dynamics in order to get to the "heart" of your attitudinal feelings about a new octagonal tea bag. Is there a girl's name you would associate with it? If it was a person, would it eat at a Berni Inn? If we had real lives, would we be trying to market stupid products that serve no apparent basic human need at all? Touchy-feely is the key note here and the touchier and feelier the better. Break down and tell them that you see a new pan scourer as your best friend or even your sexual partner, if you're ever going to be short of money again. The focus group will, in any case, be secretly filmed and it's up to you to provide some of the classic comic moments for the team until the next Eddie Izzard video comes out. The session finally ends when you become totally convinced by the product, and the person next to you claims there is a religious meaning to real Lincolnshire soya sausages. Now's the perfect time to return to the real world of themed shopping centres and the Millennium Dome and to have your existential crisis. * Interested in focus group work? Trained recruiters are employed on a project-by-project basis to select people for groups (the only way the public can become focus group members). Fees range from GBP 80-GBP 250 per project. Telephone the Association of Qualitative Research (01480 407227) for consultancy names.

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.