United States: Romancing The Focus Group

When we want to get to know someone who seems romantically attractive, we introduce ourselves, strike up a conversation, gain rapport, discover things held in common, and learn about the person’s motives. We do all of this in a shared context, hoping to make a connection.

We "connect", if we are lucky, by talking about mutual features and benefits as we weave an interesting story for one another. Both parties engage conversational techniques to persuade the other person of the shared gains that will come from a closer connection.

With a bit of thought, we can find a great many direct parallels between the romance process and the techniques of sales professionals. Both situations, personal romance or business sales and marketing, require persuasion. And in both cases persuasion only works if it is, well, persuasive in terms of what motivates the other party. Persuasion is not about what we think they probably want. Persuasion is about knowing exactly what is seductive whether in personal romance or in sales and marketing.

The key to persuasion of any kind requires knowing what the individual wants within our shared context. In interpersonal situations we know if someone is persuaded in the same manner that a comedian knows that a joke gets a laugh – or not. Sadly, focus group research often allows the focus group’s methods to get in the way of discovering whether our "concept" elicits the equivalent of a laugh – or not. Most focus group methods are so artificial in terms of "connecting" with the person that an undertaker would seem warm by comparison.

The simple fact is that none of us can force others to our point of view. We have to do it their way - to satisfy what they want. Focus group researchers often don’t know this simple rule: "The customer is always right." If the customer does not "laugh", metaphorically speaking, it is a bad concept. If you have to guess if the customer laughed, find another method. Really. If your methods do not allow you to know if the customer "laughed" or not it is, bluntly, a lousy method. If you use methods that take the "romance" or the "context" out of the investigation, you are defeating yourself.

From the customer point of view, the researchers’ concept is not right – the customer is right. If a focus group concept is not directly elicited from the customer, within the customer’s version of the context and with a really effective method, there is little chance of the effort producing the desired information or impact.

Focus groups theoretically aim to help researchers get to know people so that marketers can create an image or brand or an ad campaign that will connect with an audience. That requires tools that fit the task. However, if focus groups typically don’t resemble a romantic approach to "knowing" people, it is for a reason. Focus groups are often as far removed from the context of romance as is possible. Take Brian Doherty’s example of his experience as a focus group participant (2003. pp.53).

Imagine taking that approach to persuasiveness at a cocktail party! Would it be relevant or successful? Not on your life! Would you ask, seductively, out of context: "Would you prefer that I show you my bank balance, my muscles or my tattoo?" To the trained eye, this kind of bizarre research method takes all the romance out of the situation and ruins the relevance of the findings.

Such an ill-conceived shortcut to romance is clearly unproductive in marketing or in romance. There is a lot more to motivating someone than verbally lurching around in their presence with artificial, out of context choices. Why not put the customer in the picture and then ask them what turns them on? That ancient approach to romance has worked well enough to worry fertility experts about world over-population.

What makes focus group researchers think such a clunky approach could work any better with prospective customers? The answer: In my many years of experience, the blunt and simple truth is that most researchers are clueless about persuasion. I am chagrined to say that few researchers could persuade a hungry dog to eat a steak.

In the absence of persuasive know-how, they work with research concepts in focus groups while sales professionals work real persuasive techniques on real people. Persuasion is necessary because people have to want what you offer to them. In most cases, customers don’t want what we offer them until they are persuaded. Comparing the persuasive skills of researchers versus sales-pros yawns a disconnect as wide as the Grand Canyon.

I might add here, if you know persuasion it does not matter if you are working one-on-one sales or selling to a population of millions. Persuasion works at any scale if you know the tools. Sales and marketing must be about persuasion even though the fine points of the engineering techniques used in each context are a little different.

Understandably, marketers implicitly want to seduce (i.e., persuade) their customers. In ordinary romantic pursuits, most of us intuitively know this. Researchers, by contrast, often develop a few concepts, frequently out of context, and without a solid understanding of their customer’s motives. People don’t choose from a menu of concepts; they choose products and services that match their motives. If a concept is not guaranteed to match the motives, it won’t work.

The focus group logic, such as in Brian’s scenario, does not resemble anything romantic nor does it tap into customer motives. It is artificial and ineffective in terms of finding a romantic approach to seduction. It is conceptual, out of context, and irrelevant to "knowing" motives and it is decidedly unromantic. Clearly, the operators of that focus group had not the slightest understanding of the motivationally persuasive ingredients, whether romantic or commercial in intent. The participant, Brian, goes on:

Brian’s motives were not addressed. What he wanted evaporated in the heat of the researchers pursuing a flawed methodology to a flawed conclusion – wrecking the very process that was supposed to elicit his motivation. What he actually wanted from such a product in real life was actually on the table but was discarded by an irrelevant methodology. Other things did not compute for Brian.

Would anyone ask for a "1 to 10" rating of yourself from someone you are trying to persuade to go out on a date? Unlikely, wouldn’t you say? While a 1 to 10 answer might tell you the customer likes one product more than another, it does not tell you if they are motivated to buy either one.

The conclusion of Brian was this:

Such poor research could be viewed in different ways. Brian made his own conclusions that such a flawed approach to market research is seen as:

Those research mavens can’t pin it down because they are simply out of the loop on methods that would actually do what they want to do. "Such knowledge" is hard to pin down without effective techniques and a clear understanding of how motivation works. Clearly, floating a few concepts without a motivational context is a pointless exercise in spite of the fact that many people believe it works. Some believe in the Easter Bunny, too.

Consider that sales professionals - on the front lines of persuasion and influence - must be effective or fail to retain their job. A direct connection exists between their techniques used for persuasiveness and the resulting sales professional’s success or failure.

Advertising, on the other hand, is an indirect approach to persuasion that permits conceptual confusion to enter the decisions about the ingredients and content of persuasive ad copy. The research process suffers from the considerable distance between poorly run focus groups conducted by those without persuasive know-how by comparison to effective persuaders. Below par methods produce scrambled and misleading information that ultimately muddies the waters of a marketer’s executive decision making about ad concepts, message testing, branding issues and ad copy.

The sales executive does not suffer the confusions of typical focus group methodology. The experienced sales pro can read the motivation of the customer in real-time. The sales executive gets the relevant information directly from the horse’s mouth in terms that instruct the executive in how to produce a satisfying answer to what the customer wants.

If the sales professional should stumble over a misread motive, the error emerges from the dialog as obviously as the failure of a comedian’s joke to make an audience laugh. An immediate adjustment is made in the dialog and the sale closes satisfactorily. Perhaps at this point we might consider some optional ways to improve poorly designed focus groups.

OK, I have one "modest proposal" to get the needed information from a focus group:

• Let only sales professionals operate focus groups.

OK, if that is too immodest how about this one:

• Researchers should only be allowed to run focus groups if they learn persuasion techniques that relate to discovering real motivation.

OK, if that one is still too far out, how’s this:

• Run focus groups with expert technology that really pins down motivation in detail and defines, without question, what is motivating to a customer segment.

If you say the third suggestion can’t be done, you are not aware of how far persuasive technology has come in recent years (Yeager. 2002). Marketers need not rely on the rare person who intuitively "gets" motivation and all of its convolutions. There are plenty of solutions for the eagle-eyed researcher.

In contrast, the long, thorny gauntlet that market research data has to march, contains an inherent tendency to scramble information because focus group techniques compare poorly to those of the sales professional in terms of motivation. The sales pro knows the persuasion business and can see persuasion work in terms of the motives of the customer.

The art and science of finding out and quantifying what people think and want - the basis of the behavioral profession - has an obvious need for a technology that can address the issues of what people think and want. The above described "scientistic" (read as: "wishful thinking") has long since been surpassed.

The technology exists to read motivation unequivocally. Many researchers remain blissfully unaware of the advances in their own field. Routinely, these days, in knowledgeable quarters, human motivation is parsed into knowledgeable packets of information. That information finds its way into ad copy that works very well, thank you very much.

In Brian’s focus group, the moderators were taking the badly elicited responses of the participants at face value. Had they used a more effective protocol, they could have delved beneath the surface of the statements to get the motivational microanalysis that would have revealed the motives and concepts that would persuade their intended audience (Yeager. 2003). Motivational Microanalysis ^TM is one huge tool kit of advanced psycholinguistic techniques that parse motivation into dozens of components and clearly shows the aspects of a motive that will make a persuasive effort work – without question. Anyone can construct such a tool kit. Just read the technical journals. It is all there.

The researcher often knows only a kind of manipulatively acquired information borne of badly designed focus groups based on an absence of relevant technology that in truth ought to be equivalent to those of the sales professional’s tools. More often than not, researchers know little or nothing of sales technique but a great deal about "concepts." Concepts may or may not be relevant to motives, persuasion and sales impact.

In essence, lacking effective techniques to get real data, focus group researchers roll the conceptual dice. In contrast, sales professionals have relevant techniques to cause persuasion to happen and close the sale based on accurately identifying what the customer wants. Sales professionals change minds every day; focus group concepts are seldom as effective. But they should be.

References

Brian Doherty. (2003). Measuring Up: Testing the Pretensions of Market Research and Polling. Reason. Volume 35, No.1. May. pp. 53-54.

Yeager, Joseph. (2002). Innovative Motivational Profiling: Interviews versus Projective Techniques. Qualitative Report Nova University. Online. November.