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way for marketers to ask a big question that has occurred to
them at the end of the group.
The Tok Tekki confessional
Consumers are interviewed by a new moderator who may
ask them to open up with a confession about the group:
what did they hate about it? What was said or not said
about the product, brand or ad? How truthful was the group
overall? Who do they think lied about their answers? And
a final fact driven push – for example, ‘Fact: 90 percent of
new products fail or get delisted. How does that make you
feel about your answers now?’SIX WAYS TO GET THE BEST OUT OF
FOCUS GROUPS1
Use them for the right purpose.They are great for
understanding consumer needs, motivations, fears and
concerns, less so for predicting future purchase intent.2
Don’t hand the moderator a laundry list of
questions.Define key objectives and what you need for
action. Focus groups are not a catch-all. The more questions,
the more stimulus-response answers and potential untruths.3
Invest in great stimulus.Provocative headlines shake
consumers out of default responses. Challenge their
present category thinking.4
Get paid researchers involved.They are skilled in
creating great stimulus. Getting the agency involved is
costly and unlikely to help.5
Projective techniques demand time and licence
to play.They don’t all work in the same way with the
same people. Moderators will try one, and if it doesn’t work
swap it out for the next group. The group is not lost if one
component doesn’t work; there are always good lessons.6
Trust that your moderator is skilled in picking up
on biases and self-awareness issues.These can be
drivers of ‘untruthfulness’, but also of special secrets and
shadow selves. While everyone lies, honesty is the default.This article was sponsored by Ruby Cha Cha, the strategic
market research and planning consultancy.THE TRUTH ISSUEharder to sustain a lie in a longer narrative. Probing
helps understand motivations and bouncing helps
understand breadth – ‘Who else felt that way? Whose
experience was diff erent?’
Hidden
Where the secrets lurk. Social desirability biases and
fear prevent people from sharing their deeply held
views and desires. Diff erent to asking a person directly,
projection techniques remove onus or fear. Self-reporting
tools like thought bubbles and ‘writing a letter to my
teenage self’ allow consumers to open up by projecting
their own undesirable feelings onto inanimate objects or
unknown people.
Blind
A combination of visualisation tools, sensory and
deprivation techniques help consumers come to terms
with their actual behaviours. Getting people to go a
week without their favourite snacks or asking them
to use your brand instead of their usual opens up the
blind spot to new insights. The blind spot needs careful
management, because it deals with what the respondent
cannot see in themselves and this mostly leads to
contradiction. Contradiction is not lying, but simply a
case of self-awareness where we need to off er more of a
learning experience: ‘Sally, earlier you seemed to feel very
diff erently about this. What has changed for you?’
Unknown
This is an area we can’t really impact. The key to the Johari
window is to increase the openness and honesty as much as
possible to drive better insight.CONFESSIONALS
The confessional provides a space for people to reveal
all. It inspires truthfulness and comfort to ‘tell it like it
is’, is fl exible and can be designed with specifi cs in mind.
Participants can be chosen for a range of reasons – the
chattiest, the most withdrawn, the only woman etc. The aim
is to validate and help punctuate key lessons.
Secret sinners circle
An online tool allows people to divulge their most self-
critical behaviours, narcissistic drivers and Machiavellian
tendencies – things they are unlikely to divulge in a group
discussion – before the session. This can help consumers
be more honest as we ask them to tell a story about their
most sinful purchase and why they chose it, or their last big
binge and how much they enjoyed or hated it.
The keyboard confessional
Two respondents are provided with laptops and a platform
allowing them to write answers to some key ‘truth’
questions. This helps inform analysis and can also be a“We ask them to tell a story
about their most sinful
purchase and why they
chose it.”