Try as we might, marketing is still more a guessing game than anybody wants. Eighty percent of new products and services fail within their first six months. Most Hollywood films and new television programs fail within a month of their initial broadcast, and that includes those that were vetted by focus groups.
“The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative,” writes Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman. That’s why, although focus groups are good at identifying attitudes, they suck at predicting behavior.
The reasons for this are many, and include group dynamics, incentives and the fact that focus groups do not mimic the real world. One of the biggest reasons, though, Zaltman adds, is that most of our decision making happens on an unconscious level, far from the conscious explanations the focus group leaders gather.
Focus groups are a thing of the past, and it’s time we all move beyond them. As we have discussed previously, everything from New Coke, to the latest Pepsi logo to, CD packaging has been run up the focus group flag pole, and they were flat wrong. Save yourself some money and use the brain you were provided at birth and use that lifetime of experiences, knowledge and commonsense to know what to do next
Filed under: Industry News
