What is a focus group?

Phil told us that on Tuesday we are going to have a focus group. A focus group is a small, but diverse group of people whose reactions are studied for a market research in guided discussions about a new product to determine the reactions that can be expected from a larger population. We are using an A1 class as our focus group to find out what they think about our Digipak, homepage and a cut of the music video. At this point in the process we are far enough along for our products to look like finished products, but we still have time to make adjustments, depending on the feedback we receive from the focus group. 

To give us a better idea on how a successful focus group functions, we watched two videos about two focus groups - one that went well and another that is unsuccessful. 
Here is the first video that we watched which shows a good example of a focus group :


This focus group went well for the following reasons...
  • Because the respondents are the target audience for the product.
  • The sample is also big enough but not too big, and all the respondents are able to respond as lots of them are asked questions and what they think.
  • Because the person in charge of the focus group was someone from outside of the company - this avoids judgement of answers and make it more professional.
We then watched another video, showing a focus group that didn't go so well :


This focus group was unsuccessful because...
  •  All the questions were closed and were 'yes or no' answers.
  • They were also leading the questions with a value judgment, which made it bias and hard for the respondents to speak their minds as they relied with how they thought they should instead. 
  • Furthermore, the company were there and became angry at the respondents' answers. 

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