It’s Time to Evolve Away from Focus Groups & 1-2-1’s
Hearing what consumers think, directly from their mouths in a focus group or 1-2-1 interviews, feel like powerful ways to do research and gather key insights.
However, there are three reasons why these approaches are not as good as they seem:
- They can only ever be a limited sample. Even if you believe everything that has been said, it’s still only coming from a few respondents
- Body language and interactions can be misleading. Seeing is not, actually, believing and respondents often react the way they think others want them to react. And this is heightened in small groups with a clear leader (and is scientifically proven to be extremely hard to spot)
- It takes an incredible amount of time to arrange interviews and focus groups. Then more time to conduct them. Then more time to analyse them. And considering what you get, this time could be spent elsewhere
But to capture all you need, you don’t have to throw “live” research out of the window at all. Instead, you can follow these recommendations to get the insights you need faster and more accurately:
- Recruiting a crowd of your consumers into a safe, engaging space allows you to gather information from far more people and from a more representative group, to raise specific patterns and trends, providing greater breadth without sacrificing depth
- A live chat within your crowd is a great way to dramatically reduce the “hidden” time and cost associated with offline, or indeed online, focus groups
- Ensure that you are capturing the full range of what consumers think, feel, do and want all in one place, and in so doing, remove the risk of research blind-spots
- Do not look at consumers’ reactions, but at what they do by collecting video or pictures from different behavioural led tasks, such as product usage at home, or shopping in-store.
And the only way you can do all this in one place, where you want and how you want is with the Catalyx Consumer Activation System.
If you would like to know how we can collect thousands of data points, with full moderation and expert analysis to translate everything into strategic recommendations so good they’ve been recognised within the industry then please click here to learn more.