Focus groups are an excellent way to understand your product, to gain insights about why people use it, why they don’t use it, what problems it has, and what elements really make people love it. 

For these reasons, a focus group can be essential to helping you target the right audience and position the product correctly as you develop the product itself, packaging, advertising, and overall marketing strategy.

But focus groups don’t always work well. Sometimes the discussion guide isn’t designed right. Other times certain members of the group are too distracting, or the moderator doesn’t appropriately steer the conversation. But the biggest potential danger with focus groups is groupthink.

What is groupthink? It’s when a single opinion is expressed, and the group rallies behind it without developing opinions of their own, meaning they don’t express those opinions. Sometimes groupthink is a result of the loudest or most persuasive person making others feel like their own opinion isn’t worth sharing. When a person feels like they might be the only person in a crowd who has their particular thought, they aren’t likely to share it. In fact, they’ll change the opinion they express to conform to the group’s. Individuality disappears, and with it the valuable insights of the individual.

Part of the reason why groupthink arises is that a focus group is largely an artificial scenario.

“A focus group is an artificial construct that is so much about the group dynamic. No one buys shoes, cooks dinner, votes, banks, or even buys movie tickets sitting at a table under florescent lights while engaged in a moderated group discussion.” - Erika Hall, Mule Design Studio

Beating Groupthink

The power to beat groupthink often lies with the design of the discussion and with the skills of the moderator. One successful approach can be the 6 Hats method. With this method, participants are given the facts about a product, and then asked to privately rate the product on a scale of 1-10, based on their initial reaction. This gives a chance for each member of the focus group to develop their opinion. 

Then, each member is asked to think about the product along these specific lines in a progressive process: what is positive about the product, what’s wrong with it, how could it improve? In this way, each member of the focus group is able to further develop and defend their opinions. 

In addition to drawing out true individual sentiment, this method is also great for helping you see if an innovation is worth pursuing. An average score of 1-6 for the initial response does not bode well. 7 indicates that perhaps altered positioning might be effective. 8-10 and you should move forward.

Even if you don’t use 6 Hats, use some of its principles: let people develop and express their opinions privately first, and help people view a product from multiple points of view.

Other Issues With Focus Groups

1. Consumers generally are not talented innovators

Consumers aren’t always exercising their creative muscles to think of new products. Why would they? It’s not their job. In other words, consumers aren’t always thinking of how their vacuum, blender, or gas station could be improved. They often aren’t thinking about their moderate pain points in everyday life. They are just living their lives accepting the products they’ve chosen to use, overlooking their flaws without a second thought. When’s the last time you thought, “wow I wish this pen did something more than write,” or “what if my TV could also toast bread?” Silly examples, true, but most of us aren’t always thinking how things we use should be changed.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs

1. What people say and what they do are often very different

I personally will tell you that I like backpacking. I go once a year. My wife will tell you she likes to travel. We also do that once a year. My two-year-old will tell you he wants graham crackers, but when it comes down to it, what he really wants is fruit snacks. 

What we think we want, and what we think we’ll do is often different than reality. This is true with consumers looking to make purchasing decisions. 

“Oh yes, I’d DEFINITELY buy the hot sauce with organically grown peppers.” (You probably just like the idea of sustainability)

“Cleaning power is all I care about with detergent.” (Scent is generally more important to people)

“My laptop has to have a good processor.” (Price might be more probably more important)

What people WANT to do and buy is often very different from what they actually do when they are living their lives, trying to get out of a grocery store. The problem is that we aren’t great at predicting the future, or at separating our current feelings with how we’ll feel in the future, as Daniel Gilbert so eloquently puts it.

“When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.”

― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

For example, have you ever gone shopping on an empty stomach? Most of us make bad purchases, or too many purchases, because we can’t separate the present feeling of our stomach with how we’ll feel later when we aren’t hungry. In a focus group, this present and future conflict is in full play.