All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
New Yorker on focus groups
The New Yorker on "prediction markets" as a new form of customer research (emphasis mine):
[P]rediction markets avoid many of the faults of focus groups, which tend to be dominated by the loudest and most opinionated people, to be driven toward consensus decision, and to discourage disagreement, making them of limited usefulness. (“Seinfeld,” famously, was a complete bust with focus groups.) ... The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions...
See also - columns on non-directed customer research called "listening labs":
- Four Words to Improve User Research
- Tips on Moderating Listening Labs
(Illustration by Marc Rosenthal in the New Yorker.)
Check both www.nimanix.biz and www.nimanix.com , where they (want to) have a trading arena for predictions, and thus, to collect and integrate knowledge, and generate better predictions and decisions.
They want to have 'Knowledgeable groups' to assist organizations in forecasting and decision making processes. This may be better than focus groups (especially for political predictions), but I still prefer the listening labs...
I agree wholeheartedly with all written on focus groups -- they represent traditional methodologies that don't focus on today's highly segemented and interactive markets. A colleague at my company has developed a better way to get at customer/end-user intelligence, which is infinitely more efficient, accurate and highly cost effective. We call it OpenMind research. Unlike traditional focus groups, no ads or ideas are put in front of the group (by definition when you do that, you're telling the people in the room that you don't really care what they think) -- we ask them how they want to be "told and sold" and they tell us. The trick is getting clients to actually listen to what their audience wants instead of relying on, and bowing to, management's opinions. The research is only performed once (in most instances) because the the group is representative of the universe of stakeholders. We've found it extremely effective in creating unique marketing results that speak directly to the end user audience/customer in their own words.