Don't Lose Sight Of Focus Group Value
Insurers are increasingly using focus groups to understand the motivations of consumers and thereby guide their marketing strategies and tactics. Unfortunately, focus groups often are badly misused, which is a shame because they can be such powerful tools.
Most marketing pros either love focus groups or hate them. But focus groups and other qualitative research techniques are both loved too much and not loved nearly enough. Both camps harbor misconceptions that skew their views.
Many insurance marketers are seduced by the experience of actually being present to see customers talking in great detail about their products or services. These folks tend to see quantitative research data as dull and lifeless in comparison. In contrast, many "quant jocks" dismiss focus groups out of hand as not representative of the target population, and point to their frequent misuse as reasons why qualitative techniques should be used sparingly, if at all.
But focus groups can play valuable roles in meeting your market information needs. Qualitative approaches are particularly useful to pin down the nuances of the "whys"–understanding peoples thought processes, decision framework and emotional motivations–as opposed to the more tangible "how manys" and "which ones."
Unlike household appliances and cleaners, focus groups dont come with warning labels. So here's a few "warning labels" to consider.
Do not rely on focus groups as the sole source of market information for important decisions.
Focus groups help marketers and managers get a "sense" for the market. They are useful in fleshing out ideas, in effect getting customers or prospects to "think things through" for you from their perspective. However, while they can provide valuable insight, focus groups should not be used as the sole input for important decisions.
Use focus groups as one part of a multimethod, multisource approach to understanding your markets and their needs and preferences.
If you rely exclusively on qualitative research, you should use a combination of several qualitative techniques, such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, direct observation, journaling and open-ended questionnaires. This will balance out as much as possible the biases that are unavoidably built into each technique.
For example, while focus groups are helpful in allowing ideas to be bounced around, a possible bias is the peer pressure that might influence individual comments. Therefore, its crucial to include other non-group methods to validate the findings from focus groups.
Use focus groups both before and after doing quantitative research.
Savvy insurance marketers use focus groups to refine hypotheses for quantitative testing. An additional benefit of this approach is capturing the actual language that your target market uses so that your next level of inquiry will not be cluttered with confusing insider jargon. (The difference in language that insiders and customers use to describe the same things is often amazing.) This exploratory application is one of the most effective uses of qualitative research.
Additionally, focus groups are frequently valuable after the quantitative portion of a research project to dig further into the subtleties and nuances of the numbers. The value of post-quantitative focus groups lies in their ability to bring out elements of intensity and inflection that provide further direction for the execution of strategies.
Do not expect "breakthrough thinking" from traditional focus groups.
While many use focus groups as idea generation opportunities, the sad truth is that a group of customers or prospects is extremely unlikely to come up with a completely new idea that people inside your company havent already thought of in one form or another.
Despite conventional wisdom, it is very difficult to get a group of people to think out of the box, especially in the limited timeframe of traditional 60-to-120 minute focus groups. Youre better off identifying truly creative thinkers both inside and outside of your organization, and relying on them for ideas that you can then take to a group to help you think them through.
This is where focus groups can be most helpful in developing, refining and evaluating new ideas.
This does not mean that focus groups cant ever produce breakthroughs, but when thats the objective, you need to take nontraditional approaches in terms of techniques (for instance, using projective techniques), respondent selection and the length of time allotted to a group.
Do not rely on focus groups as the primary arbiter for product development or advertising testing.
Many companies and their ad agencies use focus groups as the biggest–or only–determinant of which creative execution is best for an upcoming ad campaign. The goal shouldnt be for the groups to judge the creative work, but rather to contribute to its development and refinement–probing how well participants understand the ads intent and success in conveying that intent, rather than how much they "like" it.
The same applies to product-development initiatives. Too often groups are used at the very end of the process as a thumbs up-or-down, and all the value they could have added is lost.
By understanding and heeding these warning labels, insurance marketers will ensure they get the maximum value from focus groups and wont be led astray.
Mark Doherty is a vice president with Chadwick Martin Bailey, Inc., a Boston-based research and consulting firm. He can be reached at markd@cmbinfo.com.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, June 24, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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