Geoff Arnold's Blog

I spent 90 minutes this morning at a focus group marketing survey event. Curiously, I’ve never heard my friends talk about participating in such a thing, nor have I seen blog comments. Perhaps everybody treats the non-disclosure agreement more strictly than I….
I think I can say a few things without violating the NDA. The focus group seemed to be concerned with the relationship between style and function in a certain category of products. I was shown into a room with six large posters, each illustrating various aspects of a different product in that category. It soon became apparent that one of alternatives these corresponded broadly to today’s product, while two represented design extremes (unattractively bland and unattractively overstyled). The remaining three choices were the ones that were really under consideration. Each represented a clear derivation from the existing product along a particular style axis.
I began by filling in a survey, in which various attributes or predicates were described and I had to rate how the attribute applied to each alternative product on a scale, from “completely” to “not at all”. One interesting twist was that many of the scales allowed for ‘overshoot’. For example, if I’d (hypothetically) been asked to rate how “cuddly” the product was, the range might have run from “not at all cuddly” through “neutral”, to “very cuddly”, and then “excessively cuddly”. Of course some of the attributes were hard to interpret (my favourite was “bold”!), and I made liberal use of the free-form comment space to describe how I’d interpreted the question.
Next I was shown the functional specs and price of each alternative. After studying these, I completed a slightly shorter survey in which I was asked to pay attention to all aspects of each product: style, features, and price.
All of that took about 50 minutes. I was then interviewed for 25 minutes, during which I had the opportunity to clarify and expand on my survey answers; we also dived into the details of certain aspects of particular products. And before I left, I was shown into a room with a different set of product posters (in a completely different product category) and asked to complete a quick survey on those. Clearly the company was running several parallel focus sessions, and were taking advantage of this to gather some extra data points.
Security seemed tight: no cellphones or other gadgets were permitted, and it was by invitation only. The sponsoring company was never named, but I guessed imediately who it was; during the interview I spent some time relating product style and features to corporate images. The process was very well designed; I felt that they had just the right number of people taking the survey at the same time, and just the right number of support staff. I received $125 for my services; truthfully, I would have done it for nothing, but it felt appropriate to get paid.
I learned one thing about myself. A number of the questions asked about buying intention: if this product was available with these features at this price, would you consider buying it? Usual 7-step spectrum answer, from “would definitely consider” to “definitely would NOT consider”. All of my answers were in the first or last columns – no “maybe” or “neutral” responses. During the interview, I interpreted this as follows: “the market is so full of competitive products that life is just too short to worry about maybes. Either something grabs me and seems worthy of serious attention, or I don’t have time for it.” I guess this is my response to the consumer confusion that comes from rampant choice in so many aspects of life (here in the First World, anyway).
Most enjoyable.

You should check our my colleague Dan Templeton’s account of his recent visit to Biloxi, MS. Recent journalistic coverage of the aftermath of Katrina has become predictable and formulaic; I liked the direct simplicity of Dan’s observations.

The part that is truly mind blowing is the scope of the damage. It’s not just a town or a city or a stretch of the coast that is damaged. It’s the entire Mississippi gulf coast. Miles upon miles upon miles of homes and businesses are gone. Four months after the storm most of the coast still looks like the destruction happened last week.