What is a Focus Group?

A focus group is an effective manner to get data or information to guide our decision making. Often, direct information from consumers is the best way to collect necessary data. 

Focus groups are just groups of consumers who are interviewed together to allow for a guided but sort of evolving discussion. So, the idea is when you have more than one person in a group together like that they can kind of feed off of each other's ideas and thoughts. You can get to a richer understanding of how they feel about either your product or your brand or or whatever it is that you want to learn about. 

The focus groups format really allows for a range of opinions or even a debate between the focus group members to to give us an even broader understanding. 

Negative Aspects of a Focus Groups

Now, one challenge with a focus group is it can lead to what's called group think, which is in this case kind of thought of as a negative. What happens with groupthink is sometimes somebody with a really strong opinion will sort of guide the whole conversation.

In that case we might not get the the quality or the range of insight that we were hoping for. So, that is something to be aware of or careful about with focus groups.

What are the Types of Focus Group?

There are 2 main types of Focus Groups:

1. Exploratory Focus Group: used to explore a new issue, to generate hypotheses, especially used in pilot project testing. Compare: Exploratory Factor Analysis.
2. Phenomenological Focus Group: try to understand the experiences of the group members; particularly used with groups of consumers, potential customers and opinion leaders.

Other  Focus Group Types include:

• Two-sided Focus Groups - One group observes the other and reports interactions.
• Dueling Focus Groups - 2 groups and facilitators take opposite positions regarding the topic. 
• Mini Focus Group - This is a group is composed of 4 to 5 members rather than 8 to 12.
• Online Focus Group - A focus group conducted via the internet.
• Tele-focus Group - A focus group conducted by telephone.

Related Topics

• Marketing Research Overview
• Quantitative and Qualitative Research
• Primary Research
• Secondary Research
• Determining the Right Marketing Strategy
• What is a Marketing Information System?
• What are Decision Support Systems?
• What are Marketing Models?
• What is a Marketing Dashboard?
• What Kinds of Data can we Use?
• Methods of Collecting Data
• What are Focus Groups?
• What is Group Think?
• What are Scanner Data?
• What is Web Tracking?
• What is Ethnography?
• What is Experimental` Research?
• What is Use of Statistics
• What Distorts the Results of Marketing Research?
• Challenges of International Market Research?