Cavemen On Fire! A Stone Age Look At Focus Groups

My friend Nalts, a top YouTube director and marketing whiz, found this brilliant spoof of focus groups:

Tip of the thinking cap to TheIdeaGroup for creating this video. My only criticism is that I didn’t think of making this myself. (BTW, why is everything funnier with a British accent?)

Focus groups have notoriously rejected minivans, Seinfeld, and telephone answering machines. (“What do I need a machine to answer my phone for? I’m perfectly happy doing it myself…”) They’re statistically irrelevant — indeed, statistically worthless — and the participants are under huge “group think” pressure to conform. In fear of making a mistake, participants tend to favor the familiar and reject the unusual. That spells doom for innovation.

Yet, because focus groups are “scientifically” conducted by overpaid consultants in controlled environments, people take their feedback seriously. I’d rather conduct one-on-one interviews with each person, with the goal to determine their needs and issues.

For more sensible approaches to marketing research, please read my post: Freeze: “Paralysis by Analysis” and other Joys of Marketing Research.