Notes

Successful Innovation Does Not Come From Using Focus Groups
It's a worrying undeniable fact that the effectiveness for brand spanking new product concepts is under 20%, despite them being regularly vetted in focus groups. This should lead us to question whether the qualitative focus group may be the right tool to use for ideation or concept testing.
The notion of using a focus group in NPD is to look for and find out the true emotions, experiences and opinions of clients - to be able to identify an unmet need or appraise the potential of an product idea (and, hopefully, improve upon it). However, over the past a decade, there is a shift in opinion, amid increasing evidence that focus groups actually kill ideas, specially the most creative ones.
So exactly why is there the fact that focus groups kill innovation? Maybe it appears from many frustrating hours of watching focus groups and reading the consequent debriefs with heavy hearts. NPD and true innovation would depend on uncovering deep insights and unknown solutions to problems that, often, consumers didn't know they had. But from the experience, focus groups, by their very nature, are merely not equipped to get this done - for three key reasons:
1. An artificial environment
It's unsurprising that people find it difficult to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas inside a focus group. It is, in fact, a really unnatural environment - essentially strangers thrown together inside a windowless room, being led by another stranger, knowing their every move and testamonials are being watched by faceless others. Would this help you feel comfortable in revealing your deeper thoughts or perhaps in expressing ideas?
Companies spend lots of time and money on generating safe and creative atmospheres for internal ideation workshops and brainstorming. But we expect consumers to start and spill the beans inside a totally artificial and non relaxing environment. Unsurprisingly, it simply doesn't happen.
2. The tip with the iceberg
According to behavioral economists, economic decision-making is 70 percent emotional and 30 % rational. In focus groups, the opposite is valid. Consumers will rationalise their thoughts and responses. They will play the role of helpful by trying to remove the emotion from other responses. Unfortunately, brands mainly live and experience emotion. Consumers goes in terms of to use tough to respond to your questions and provides opinions, regardless of whether they do not know the solution or whatever they say isn't true. At best, focus groups give to us a truthful and factual account of clients' conscious thinking process - but that a lot, is problematic.
Neuroscientists declare that people can only access about 5% of their cognitive processes - which is, the thoughts, associations and emotions that happen within our brains. Harvard Business School professor, Gerald Zaltman, supports this theory in his excellent book How Customers Think. He writes: 'Most with the thoughts and feelings that influence consumers' and managers' behaviour happen in the unconscious mind.' And, in summary: 'Contrary to standard wisdom, [focus groups] are certainly not effective when developing and evaluating cool product ideas.'
The fundamental concern is that focus groups are battling contrary to the idea that a lot of our thoughts about is unconscious, and our emotions are intertwined with your reasoning. Consumers within bring in more business usually are not being irrational or lazy, just unconscious (not literally, although some people might with the focus groups we've watched...!)
3. Seeing the long run
Every brand wants to stand out from the bunch by planning to differentiate itself in the competition. However, this will be the one thing that consumers in focus groups inherently dislike about new products and innovation ideas. They prefer to remain in 'familiar territory' in doing what is comfortable and expected, and inside their current frame of reference. It's just human instinct.
So, when focus groups are offered the unfamiliar, their natural reaction would be to respond with scepticism and doubt. And this may be the reason why many innovative ideas, products and services experience difficulty taking off.
This can also be problematic when focus groups are used to test new ideas. In these cases, negative feedback often shuts down the concept before it even reaches market. Most people have no idea the things they want before they find it and so they can't understand an innovation that comes into solve an issue they don't really yet know they've got. As Henry Ford famously said: "If I gave people the things they said they wanted, I would are making a faster horse".
So what's the answer?
So if consumers can't invent the near future - and asking people in focus groups what they want or need isn't getting the crooks to - is there a best tactic in driving new ideas for innovation?
Now, more than ever, you will find there's broader spectrum of exploratory research methodologies for insight and idea generation - and also the choices are growing all the time. Using these new and innovative methods allows us - and our clients - please take a fresh perspective and understand consumers from new angles.
Ethnographic and 'in-situ' based research methods involve an anthropologist spending time with people since they attempt their day-to-day lives, to be able to observe how they will use and experience products. The validity of such methods is finally beginning to be recognised, after years of derision. And people 'in-the-know' are actually needs to appreciate this approach can produce invaluable insights. Reach now has an anthropologist as permanent member of our strategy team.
Success is based on spending quality, one-to-one time with folks in natural settings, and utilizing a practical system. have a peek at this website to see the limitations and possibilities of consumers' abilities to build and understand new ideas. We must be capable of get rid of the blinkers and expands minds. We do this by showing consumers the longer term - and the possibilities - setting up a new frame of reference, which helps them to visualise and understand new ideas and concepts.
The end goal of any NPD or innovation process is sales and market success. We would like to understand the failure rate for first time products drop from more than 65% - as well as the first step is always to stop the default utilization of focus groups. They may seem to be the quickest and cheapest method to gather consumer opinions, however, if the odds are stacked against you they may be surely a false economy.
Focus groups may also be comfortable plus a known entity - but this may be the very antithesis of innovative thinking. To quote one with the world's most innovative thinkers, Albert Einstein, "Insanity [is] doing exactly the same thing again and again and expecting different results." So for true innovation, along with a competitive advantage, try involving and working with consumers in the different way.
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