Team Picks – Focus Groups by Sam

Hi there – My name is Sam, and I’m a member of the My View Research team! I have over 25 years of experience in Market Research, working both agency and client side. I am a qualified researcher gaining the MRS Advanced Certificate in Social and Market Research Practice.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to understand what customers really think about something is by asking them directly. Focus groups allow participants to express themselves freely, gaining insight into their own experiences and those of others.

Like other qualitative methods, focus groups are useful in providing interpretations of data collected through quantitative methods.

For me there’s nothing quite like meeting customers face-2-face and getting to know them. You get to experience a wide range of attitudes and opinions first-hand, which enables you to properly understand the social and cultural influences on their behaviours. This method of qualitative research tells us the ‘why’, whereas quantitative research gives us the ‘what’.

I love to see how focus groups can spark off new ideas through participants sharing their opinions or experiences.

Qualitative research gives us rich insight and tells us why people think and behave the way they do. This research enables us to get a deeper understanding of products, opinions, and motivations. You can use different techniques to delve deeper, for example: using word and image associations.

One of the biggest benefits of using focus groups is that they give you a chance to test out new ideas. For example, brand and advertising campaigns can be tested using stimulus materials without having to spend money on advertising. This means you can find out early on whether your idea will work or not.

Qualitative research can help to focus ideas for a quantitative survey. It is also useful for developing hypotheses to test amongst customers. Additionally, using qualitative research first can help with designing a quantitative survey so you can hear the language a customer would use, along with designing a questionnaire that fits with a customer’s journey or experience.

You can use qualitative data from your focus groups to enrich the insights that were revealed in your quantitative survey. Qual focus groups or interviews might be conducted after a Quant survey to clarify the reasons behind the findings, or as post survey analysis to understand unexpected results.