FreshNetworks Blog

Last night, I was actually a participant in a focus group. This was a new experience for me. I’ve seen groups before, even moderated a few, but never sat in the respondent’s chair. The group was about a trade magazine I subscribe to and it was clear that the brand wanted to understand where else we got news and comment from, how we ranked this magazine compared to others, and then to test some new concepts with us.

Focus groups are a useful research instrument. I’ve used them lots in the past and our sister company, FreshMinds Research, does focus groups for clients all the time. Last night I was just reminded that they’re not always the answer to a client’s needs.

Focus groups work when you’re looking for getting a small group of people to give instant reactions to and feedback on a product. Or to explore people’s attitudes to an experience of event. They don’t allow for reflection and so really suit a situation where the brand has quite well developed ideas that they want to audit or assess.

Last night’s group was a great case of where more reflection was needed. We were presented with a range of potential new formats for the magazine, sections that might be included and layouts. Each time, it was described verbally by the moderator and we were asked if it was a good idea or not and then encouraged to talk about it. As a respondent, this was actually really difficult to do. I had no time to think about one idea in any depth before we moved on to the next one. I don’t think we were able to give reasoned and intelligent responses beyond a simple “sounds good” or “not really” when presented with these ideas.

This is where online research communities can really come to the fore. They allow a longer and more reflective engagement between the brand and the respondents. In fact they’re no longer just people responding to stimulus, but members of a discussion. You can show material at an earlier stage in development and get the community members to discuss and brainstorm ideas over a longer time period. Allowing people to contribute when they have an idea and something to say, rather than dictating responses in a short time period one evening after work.

Online research communities are a great way of letting people reflect and allowing the brand to understand why they react as they do to stimuli. If people are against a concept it may not be the concept as a whole but just one aspect of it, and you’re most likely to find this out if you engage in an iterative process with them.

But most of all, focus groups rely on the participants having ideas on demand during a relatively short period. This works where the group is focused, and about reviewing and commenting on already developed ideas. But last night I was left with that awful experience where I thought more about some of the concepts we were shown on the way home.  I had ideas that I had no outlet for. The research engagement was over and so any ideas I had afterwards were not taken onboard.

The French have a phrase, l’esprit d’escalier, which means the thought you have after you’ve left a room and it’s too late to say it. There’s a real danger of this feeling with focus groups. Online research communities, on the other hand, provide a way for these kind of thoughts to be captured as part of the research process.

At the E-consultancy Future of Digital Media conference last week the focus was on two magic words “relevance” and “engagement”. In Ian Jindal’s stimulating and lively talk he correctly pointed out that marketing hasn’t actually changed much, even though where we choose to communicate our messages may have. Consumers are at saturation point so the only thing left is for companies to get better at attracting customers from their competitors. The ‘How’ was the focus of the day. There were three themes:

1. engaging customers around content using publishing techniques
2. how to add a layer of social discovery around your brand
3. finding ways to manipulate data to do our marketing for us

Many Intermediaries, product manufacturers and retailers are developing strategies around multimedia content to engage customers. Thomas Cook showed a particularly impressive video of their new 360 degree marketing strategy, complete with store front touch screens, co-browsing between customer and agent and every conceivable video clip you could imagine to show you what your resort will be like when you get there (which somehow I felt took the discovery out of it). The issue for most companies with this approach is the sheer cost of it and the skill sets needed to become programmers and publishers, as well as focus on your core business. The other issue was that there was one viewpoint that appeared to be missing from the strategy – the customer’s! Thomas Cook is still in broadcast mode.

The jury was out when it comes to engaging customers effectively using social network sites like Facebook. Brands are just not managing to attract the levels of fans they would like and I believe that it’s because people are, well, hanging out with friends and simply not in buying mode. Companies that have developed non intrusive, useful and engaging tools like Mydeco’s Roomshare seem to be having more success. Considering 56% people go to a brands home page to check out information first, it might be better to find a way to encourage people to stay there. For sectors like Insurance, where aggregator sites like Confused.com and cashback sites like Quidco.com have contributed to a reduction of customer lifetime value from 3-5yrs to 1-2yrs, the focus has to be on finding better ways of retaining their customers once they are delivered to their door.

Understanding data is essential to running any business and more importantly what action you take from looking at it. The new kid on the block is APML or attention profiling markup language. It is a common standard to describe your interests, likes and dislikes and how much each means to you (weighting). The idea is that your attention profile is owned by you and is portable so you can decide which websites you want to share it with for more relevant surfing. Currently Amazon is the only company doing a good job of recommending to us what we’re interested in but they own your profile and the process isn’t transparent. In theory it’s a great way to reduce information overload but it feels like a very long way off, if at all feasible. When I think about how I tag my del.icio.us bookmarks with words like ‘cop’ (which to me means community of practice, not policeman) and when I think about how often I change my likes and dislikes, it feels like someone is going to have to do a lot of work to maintain this profile (either me or a very clever programmer). I would love to hear your thoughts on this whole area!

Don’t get me wrong, as data fragments into smaller, accessible pieces, there are many innovative ways to play it back to your customers in really useful ways. Some good examples that add a valuable social layer for customers include the new AMEX Members Know community where members can see the most popular hotels and restaurants based on anonymous purchase data and Flickr’s use of the Exif data hidden in your digital photos about which camera was used to take a photograph which is the served up as a league table of the best digital cameras. We’re going to see a lot more of this.

I tend to agree with Simon Waldman of the Guardian who commented that sometimes qualitative measures like “Why are you on our site and did you get what you came for?” are equally important. Having conversations with your customers might just reveal what they actually want from you!