Marketing Research 200 - Disadvantages of Focus Group and Recent Trends

Marketing Research 200

Curtin University

Rebecca Licacristi Budianto 

15359111

Disadvantages of Focus Group and the Recent Trends

Introduction

Many of the businesses today are conducting a research, especially who operates in providing products and services. There are so many ways to conduct a research and one of them is focus group. It is a small number of people with similar background or interest who are brought together to discuss a particular product, idea or issue. The results from their responses will be studied to measure the reaction that represents larger market population. Focus groups sound effective for doing research, but, everything has its own advantages and disadvantages. This essay will discuss about the disadvantages of using focus groups and also the recent trends in focus group.

Focus Group                                              

Focus group refer to a group consists of 7 to 10 participants from the target market to discuss a particular topic. The participants are not just anyone but the potential audience. According to Belch and Belch (2009, 265), participants should be selected based on characteristics, it may include, homogeneity in occupation, social class, level of education or family characteristics and more. The participants have to be unfamiliar with each other because familiarity can restrict disclosure, hard to establish new relationship with each other and may be difficult to know what might influence the participants (Franz 2012, 1381).  The participants are expected to be free sharing their opinions and ideas.

There are one or two moderators who will be asking several questions or statement and offer to try products. The purpose of the moderator is to maintain the discussion going. The experienced moderator will create a huge impact in the atmosphere during the focus group (Throupe 2011, 307). After doing the focus groups, the researchers will analyze and summarize the results of the group outcome, give recommendations for the future based on the results, to increase the customer size, loyalty and revenue. It is important to stay in touch with the customers regularly.

Disadvantages

The major disadvantages of focus groups are, first, the final outcome might be biased because participants in focus group tend to get influence by dominant people in the discussion (Hines 2000, 11). In every focus group, there must be some people who will have a strong argument and it might influence the other people. Second, it is not easy for the participants to share their personal opinions towards sensitive topics publicly (Hautzinger 2012, 26). For example, like asking about age especially to women and more.

Third, in focus group, people are being gathered together and they might behave differently from how they behave when no one watches and it will indirectly affect the quality of research results (Threlfall 1999, 104). Forth, moderator might also lead the participant to reach certain assumptions or conclusions. Some participants might not dare to against the moderator’s opinion, which means, what the participant said might be not honest (Hartman 2004, 405).

Focus group is expensive and time consuming. Usually the participants will be given compensation. For example, Singapore Airlines (SIA) planning to have a focus group regarding the in-flight services. The participants who will be invited must have demographic like, medium-high income level, business people who travel frequently. This kind of people are very busy, they might have disagreement to just lend them their time. So, to ensure that these participants will come, SIA offered compensation such as, stay for a night in four stars hotel, dinner with free expensive wine and more. This is to let the participants feel the leisure and happy to lend their time for the focus group.

Recent Trends

The first recent trend for focus group is online focus group. Online focus group has become increasingly popular. It is offer various advantages like lower costs, larger reach, greater access to busy professionals and more. No need for any special software, internet connection and computer are enough. It is same like the normal focus group where all the participants can see and react to the other participants and also to the moderator (Bruggen and Willems 2009, 365). It is appropriate for the participants that are not able to do face-to-face focus group session and dispersed throughout region.

Through online focus group, the participants are able to respond at their comfort zone without any pressure from other participants in the normal focus group setting (Stancanelli 2010, 764). The ability of internet technology has reduce various barriers to conducting focus group, Online focus group can be conducted through several ways like online typing, the participants can use a keyboard to express their opinion. The other one is online video or videoconferencing. It is use a camera and microphone to transmit voice and facial expressions (Cheng, Krumwiede and Sheu 2009, 220).

There second recent trend for focus group is social media or social networking. It gives great impact to the society. Today’s internet users are using social media sites to communicate their personality to their friends and the world. Social media is the world’s biggest, fastest and most honest focus group (Rupprecht, 2011).

Within the social networks there are people who had lot of contacts and able to spread message quickly to a large number of people, the persuaders that able to spread the news uniquely and also trustworthy information that spread through social network (Cooke and Buckle 2008, 275). For example, a person publish a link about the advertisement of a products, if it is interesting then it might invite the others to take a look at it too, spread the news faster.  At the end, it will result in product popularity that may lead to increase sales for the company.

The Growth of the Recent Trends in Focus Group

The reasons why these recent trends have evolved is because online focus group could help reduce costs and remove the barriers related with timing and location. Psychological distance of the internet could stimulate group participation and encourage self-disclosure especially for persons who hesitate to participate in face-to-face focus group. More self-disclosure due to high private self-awareness and less in public self-awareness cause by the medium provided resulting in greater tendency to reveal personal information (Reid and Reid 2005, 156). It contributes significantly more new ideas or answers.

Most of businesses recognize the importance of social media. Social media is another form of word-of-mouth and makes it so important to monitor and analyse what people say on social media. Market research might use social media to get a better understanding of the customers, their attitudes and opinions (Casteleyn, Mottart and Rutten 2009, 443). Social media is important to provide meaningful business insights.

 Conclusion

To conclude, the growth of the recent trends in focus group has overcome the disadvantages of face-to-face focus group. Through online focus group, the distance in between participants and moderator would make each individual might have more courage and confident to speak out their points. It is more effective for the moderator and efficient to the participants. Through social media, businesses can observe and analyse the current pattern of consumers by the way the consumers interact or react to the current situation in order to understand what they needs and want. 

  

References

Belch, George E and Michael A. Belch. 2009. Advertising and Promotion. New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin.

Bruggen, Elisabeth and Pieter Willems. 2009. “A critical comparison of offline focus groups, online focus groups and e-Delphi.” International Journal of Market Research 51 (3): 363-381.

Casteleyn, Jordi, Andre Mottart and Kris Rutten. 2009. “Forum: How to use Facebook in your market research.” International Journal if Market Research 51 (4): 439-447.

Cheng, Colin C., Dennis Krumwiede and Chwen Sheu. 2009. “Online audio group discussions.” International Journal of Market Research 51 (2): 219-241.

Cooke, Mike and Nick Buckley. 2008. “Web 2.0, social networks and the future of market research.” International Journal of Market Research 50 (2): 267-292.

Franz, Nancy K. 2011. “The Unfocused Focus Group: Benefit or Bane?” The Qualitative Report 15 (5): 1380-1388.

Hartman, Jackie. 2004. “Using Focus Groups to Conduct Business Communication Research.” Journal of Business Communications 41 (4): 402-410.

Hautzinger, Sarah. 2012. “Depending on Context: Counterintuitive Uses of Focus Groups in Mixed-Method Ethnographic Research.” Human Organization 71 (1): 22-31.

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Rupprecht, Kyle. 2011. The World’s Biggest Focus Group? Movie Maker. Accessed March 30, http://www.moviemaker.com/distribution/article/fizziology_alterian_social_networking_box_office_20110829/

Stancanelli, Jeanine. 2010. “Conduction and Online Focus Group.” The Qualitative Report 15 (3): 761-765.

Threlfall, K. Denise. 1999. “Using focus groups as a consumer research tool.” Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science 5 (4): 102-105.

Throupe, Ron, PhD. 2011. “The Use of Focus Groups for property Valuation Research.” The Appraisals Journal Fall: 301-313.