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RSSI'll start this column with a few quotes:
"What we didn't get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn't something that came out in the research."-Neil Campbell, president, Tropicana, North America to The New York Times upon pulling its revamped packaging in February after consumer complaints.
"We have heard your concerns about the ad that was featured on our website. We are parents ourselves and we take feedback from moms very seriously."-Kathy Widmer, vice president of marketing, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, upon pulling a Motrin ad after mothers expressed outrage about it in November.
"Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."-Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook, responding to user outrage over changes made, without user input, to its terms of service in February.
"The testing we've done has been incredibly positive." -David Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel to The New York Times on Monday about its proposed new name, Syfy. So far, a post on Sci Fi's own blog about the new name contains more than 900 mostly negative comments, and has more than 1500 Diggs.
I assume most Social Media Insider readers would agree with the statement that corporate America needs to do a little work on this listening thing. What I love about all of these examples is that, even if many of you have preached this gospel for some time, there's an increasing body of evidence to support why this is so important. This week's Syfy example (and yes, I did post about this over at the BNET Media blog to which I also contribute), marks at least the fourth time since November in which a major corporation has gotten itself in hot water through the act, or in-act, of not listening. If I were you, I'd clip and save those four quotes and trot them out to all of my clients.
But this column isn't just about not listening. It's about the fact that so often, if companies do, they commit a significant sin of omission, listening to customers who were either not invested in their brand very much or not invested in it at all. Worse, they do this listening in the contrived environment of the focus group. The president of Tropicana admitted that it didn't listen to its loyal customers, in his interview with the Times, for example.
Then there's the whole question of what compels a corporation to engage in big change initiatives in the first place. More often it's from within, rather than from without, where the consumers live. This quote from designer Peter Arnell, from the press conference about the new Tropicana packaging, particularly stands out: "There was a strong drive to bring a big messaging onto the carton where the biggest single billboarding was." On whose part? Why do I doubt it was the consumer's?
The people at Sci Fi, or SyFy, or whatever you care to call it, pounded their chests over the testing they did with consumers over the new name, but as Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer for TNS Cymfony, speculated yesterday, in all likelihood those focus groups were not the media property's core audience, but the people they were looking to attract. It's highly ironic that in the Times interview, Howe actually says that he wanted to avoid a "Tropicana debacle," only to immediately find himself in one. He thought he was listening, but was he listening to the right people? Doesn't look like it.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the challenge companies face in trying to expand beyond their core, but, courting new lovers at the expense of the old is a recipe for disaster, and it's only compounded when focus groups are held up as the last word in what consumers want. "You need a little safe, quiet laboratory to test these things in -- and focus groups are not it," Nail said to me yesterday. "Because there's always the dynamic that people are showing up for their $50 and M&Ms."
Exactly. While that's always been the case, as use of social media channels becomes more ubiquitous, the very idea that a focus group is valuable is ridiculous -- when compared with the real conversation taking place among the people who really care about your brand. The focus group is dead. But when will marketers notice?
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First let me share the "off the record" news that focus groups conducted with loyal Tropicana OJ users clearly indicated problems existed, if the company adopted the new packaging. Either the team working on the redesign chose not to share this information with senior management or they incorrectly believed the customers could be persuaded with enough advertsing and time. (the grapevine says they felt they could change customers minds despite the research learning) The issue wasn't the focus group tool or which customers provided the feedback, but the willingness to of the marketers to listen and learn what customers were saying.
Focus groups are a highly valuable tool, when they are the right tool for the task at hand -- exploring needs, thoughts, feelings, purchase decisions, perceptions of brands, customer experiences and some communications issues. They are also useful for clarifying results from quantitative research, that is, diagnosing what is meant by certain types of results.
However, focus groups should be one of a set of research tools (research methods) considered based on a clear definition of the business issue being addressed. Other qualitative and quantitative research approaches should be considered (one on one depth interviews, bulletin boards, online or telephone or even mail surveys, and monitoring social media) depending on the issues being addressed and the audiences from which feedback is sought.
So how about rethinking your column and helping set the record straight on focus groups. They are unquestionably useful, when they are appropriately used and they are conducted by qualified, skilled moderators/qualitative research consultants.
During the past 25 years, I have observed and conducted focus groups and used other appropriate research tools to keep companies from making major mistakes regarding packaging, advertising, business policy decisions, brand positionings, product features for high tech products, and customer experience management. I have also helped companies, across almost every business sector successfully introduce major brands, products and services. I have helped companies change their processes to better meet customer needs frequently boosting employee satisfaction in the process. We have done this by honing in on the primary benefits desired and needing to be communicated, optimizing product offerings, refining customer experiences, identifying questions that needed to be asked in quantitative research and making sure the questions asked were asked in language understood by the people being surveyed. Unfortunately, I have also seen intelligent, experienced business professionals from all disciplines dismiss the learning gained from focus groups, IDIs, observational research and surveys, because it challenged their conventional wisdom or rocked the boat of a marketing plan and deadlines.
As intelligent marketers, responsible journalists and bloggers, we need to stop saying focus groups are dead. Rather, we need to focus on making sure the focus groups and all research is conducted by experts who know how to assure to research is conducted effectively and the learning is clearly communicated.
If this is done, the only ones left to blame will be those failing to listen to their customers/prospective customers.
more here: http://bit.ly/Syfy
byweimeanyou.com
I would say that the same advice could be used for social media. While you will get valuable information from a select group of customers/users who choose to reply, it's always difficult to determine their motivations.
As a creative with with a lot of years experience in the online and offline worlds, I don't have the most faith in 12 people in room with nothing better to do on a Wednesday night. Nor do I have implicit faith in anonymous writers alone in front of keyboards on a the same Wednesday night.
Social is a useful tool, but as with focus groups, we need to listen carefully, and use it to ask better questions, not make final decisions.
As was said in some earlier replies, the content of the questions and the techniques used to probe for the answers can make or break the success of focus groups. Any measuring techniques suffer from what scientists call the observer effect (changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed). With focus groups, as with other techniques, skillful marketers can obtain good answers on which to base their decisions.
As with all marketing, the medium you use to obtain information from the target audience has to be based on what will reach a representative sample of that audience as well as what will get respondents to provide accurate answers.
Focus groups in the hands of skilled marketers can be a very effective channel for obtaining good information. Exceptions don't make the rule. Henry Ford would have probably made a faster horse, if he knew how to make one.
The thing that's perhaps most important is that when you listen and understand what is being said, you still have to decide what to do about it. That requires judgment and a lot more, and it's where the rubber meets the road. Because if you listen to everyone out there, you won't get anything done and won't do anyone any favors.
I, for one, think that it has become very difficult to effectively listen while concurrently having a sense of focus and purpose. And it has probably given many CMOs gray hair.
Steve Howe, President/COO, Passenger http://www.thinkpassenger.com
Wow, you hit on a tender subject here. Apparently Focus Grouping is a pretty big industry.
We listen in to the world's largest unstructured, organic focus group. It's called the internet!
This technique of online anthropology works really well for understanding why people do what they do (motivations, drivers, issues, etc.) but is really bad for asking specific questions.
Focus groups are still useful for getting feedback on specific ideas you have - but you might want to listen to consumers in the wild first!
TO'B
Ultimately, companies need to hardwire the voice of their customers into their daily operations. They need to know who they're listening to, and to more fully understand the "why's" behind those expressions of sentiment far better than 140 characters allows. So by all means, observe the trends in tweets, but don't mistake that for the kind of holistic consumer understanding and relationship that companies ultimately need.
Incidentally, we asked members of one of our proprietary women's communities what they thought of the whole Twitter/Motrin saga (since they didn't bring it up themselves -- notworthy in its own right). While most were underwhelmed by the ad’s content and creative, they were very polarized on the question of whether it was offensive to women. Among those who were not offended by the ad (the majority opinion), there was a pervasive view that the Twitter moms were overly sensitive and atypical. And regardless of their response to the ad, the overwhelming number of respondents was neither aware of nor used Twitter. So does this mean that J&J should not have withdrawn the ad? No -- it's never a good idea to offend any portion of your customer base. But ultimately, the question of how Motrin reacted is less relevant than the question of how they might have averted this problem in the first place. On this issue our community members displayed remarkable consensus that Motrin should have proactively gotten more input from moms both before the ad was released and after. And that is perhaps the biggest moral of this short but feverish story: to develop products and messaging that resonate with customers, brands must hardwire their voices into every facet of their business on an *ongoing* basis.
There's an interesting and hearty diversity of opinions that have evolved over the last 18 hours since I last posted. Let me add another entity within marketing that isn't dead yet but the nurse is coming in with the morphine - Marketing Research and Analytics. Ultimately, Marketing Research is the study of people and their behaviors which is good and I support and applaud it but when the sought after results turn into numbers and spreadsheets, it becomes cold very quickly and you loose all sense of humanity. Not to mention the time and energy it takes to track and evaluate this research is staggering and the researchers often loose the capacity to identify the nuggets in the sea of data. The biggest challenge I have is that it is evaluating the past, sometimes the distant past. The 21st century marketing will be driven by the human factors and needs of the present and future which is something that doesn’t come across in spreadsheets. That’s why social has taken off as it has. It provides control, connection and a new means to communicate. My recommendation is to eliminate focus groups, minimize your agency’s research department and build a sociological and physiological department...immediately.
A little basic marketing 101- Focus groups are qualitative research. You use them to try out ideas and collect new ones. They should be followed by quantitative research that validates some of these ideas.
I would never say the focus group is dead. I would say that social media gives us some new tools to use to test ideas.
Nice attention grabbing headline and great quotes...but let's get serious!
BTW- The whole Tropicana thing was ridiculous- I've been involved in several massive repackaging projects- incremental change is the only way to go when you have an established brand image - why in the world wasn't this design change done incrementally - leaving the big orange in place and slowly adding more contemporary design over time?
Yes, there are huge shifts going on, which are amazing. There are new and better ways to "interact" and "listen" to people. It's truly awesome. Every brand, if possible, needs to embrace social media. But to simply kill off the focus group is foolish. Killing off quantitative research would be foolish too. They both need to be evolving. Not to be crude, but is social media the best/only way to help the makers of Depends listen to their loyal, or potential customers?
8 tracks died because the next generation of technology made them completely irrelevant. Are you telling me that there will never be an instance where focus groups can be useful?
Hey, who stole my soap box?
Does that statement give anyone else a "dude, wtf" moment?
Angelica: agree, and very much so!
You are blaming the channel and that just isn't fair. The problem is tin-eared marketers unwilling to listen to consumers and/or hear that they may be wrong. I've presented focus group findings and the data from a scan of CGM and have been met with the full-range of responses.
There is nothing inherently wrong with focus groups. They offer lots of advantages. The problem is with a desire to learn and be open to hearing.
Listening to customers or conversations, like social media, is actually nothing new. It's all in how you listen and most importantly how capable one is of removing bias and judgement from your analysis. The tools and medium may change, but at the end of the day it's all about the ability to find meaning behind what you hear.
First of all, any research can be easily manipulated. If a researcher (or researcher's internal client) has an agenda (changing the brand's logo, for example) it's very easy to make sure research proves the point it is supposed to prove.
Second, even if research is done correctly (good sample, good moderator, good discussion guide), interpreting the results is the researcher's job, and it's not an easy one. If the interpretation is wrong, the tool isn't to blame for it.
Third, research (if done properly) offers objectivity which several die-hard fans do not possess - exactly because they are die-hard fans. As a very astute person told me once about die-hard fans of his software about the new releases: they are the ones who complain the loudest about the changes, and they are also the first ones to buy the new version...
Douglas for College of Charleston: Social norms? Since when is it the social norm for you to pay someone $50, $75 or $100 give them a sandwich a coke and some cheese doodles to say nice things about you? A little less honesty?
You should take stock in the lack of anonymity that facebook, twitter and many many unmasked bloggers are quite comfortable with. The days of irrelevant childish cryptic chat forum handles are waning. The SyFy switch was silly and poorly thought out, regardless of the quality of the posters on chat forums, reading Twitter posts off Twitter Search right now, everyone is identifiable in their profile page, the sentiments there are the same.
Sanjay Dholakia CMO, Lithium Technologies, Inc. www.lithium.com @sdholakia
But in a focus group, where social norms are more polite because people's faces are seen, you get fewer insane objections. Maybe you get a little less honesty, but you don't get the rude people who are not representative of the public.
I seem to recall a similar hue and cry over the name Spike! for another cable channel, with many criticizing the folly of such a choice. But that died down and no one talks about it anymore. I predict the same for SyFy. A tempest in a teapot, and, no, no one is going to think it's the Syphilis Channel, which is one of the more ridiculous complaints from the vaunted 900.
I bet you were one of the people yelling about how direct mail would be non-existant 5 years ago. That is still here too, playing a role WITH digital media. All things work well when used appropriately.
www.theinteractivemarketer.com
The Facebook redesign may have looked fine as a static mockup, but Facebook isn't a brochure-ware site, it's data-driven. Without a unique user's data, it's just an empty shell.
Facebook keeps trying to redesign that shell as though IT were the value that users keep returning for. It's not - users are returning for THEIR friends and photos and updates. You can't test-drive a data-driven site with fake data. It's a lot messier to put the real thing out there and let people play with it - but it's the only hope of getting truly representative feedback.
But the real tough questions are: - Who are the right customers to listen to? - And what are they really saying?
After segmenting customers and weighting their feedback (perhaps by authenticity, profitability, loyalty or potential for growth), it's incredibly difficult to interpret the real meaning or intent of customer expression. Customers may say one thing, but their pain or desire may have to do with something they can't even articulate. It's a cliche, Henry Ford's quote speaks well to the point: "If I had listened to my customers I would have made a faster horse."