Why everyone lies in focus groups. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
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D IS C U S S
MONEYBOX: COMMENTARY ABOUT BUSINESS AND FINANCE.
Lies, Damn Lies, and
Focus Groups
WHY DON'T CONSUMERS TELL THE TRUTH
ABOUT WHAT THEY WANT?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 6:29 PM ET
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Here's a paradox: Fifty million Americans have registered for
the national Do Not Call list, suggesting they don't want to be
bothered by telemarketers and won't buy if they are. Yet
telemarketers want to keep calling them. Why? Because the
marketers realize that what consumers say they want and
what they actually do are not the same: Those who don't want
to be called actually buy from telemarketers when they are
called. This evidence of consumer untrustworthiness got
Moneybox thinking about focus groups. If consumers lie, what
good are focus groups?
Evidence suggests focus group participants often lie. "The
correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is
usually low and negative," writes Harvard Business School
professor Gerald Zaltman in his influential book How
Customers Think. After all, he notes, 80 percent of new
products or services fail within six months when they've been
vetted through focus groups. Hollywood films and TV pilots—
virtually all of which are screened by focus groups—routinely
fail in the marketplace.
Focus groups have become a requirement of everything from
product launches to political campaigns. But even though few
in the industry question their value, a huge gap yawns
between customer intentions expressed in focus groups and
behavior in the marketplace.
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There are several reasons for this. Start with the participants.
Sure, they're all volunteers and presumably well-disposed to
the process. But psychological reasons exist that could lead
them to say one thing in the confines of a windowless
conference room and do another thing at the mall. Moneybox
has participated in a few focus groups—and has talked to
several people who conduct them. And it seems clear that the
motivations of those who show up are varied. Some come
because they need the cash, not because they have a deep
desire to express their consumer preferences. Others come for
the cookies and punch or for the opportunity to interact with
other humans. Still others—including Moneybox—spend a lot
of time trying to suss out precisely who is doing the testing.
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Page 1 of 4
Why everyone lies in focus groups. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
11/25/07 5:20 PM
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A small percentage of focus group participants may indeed lie
maliciously—although it takes a particularly devious criminal
mind to go to such lengths to mislead marketers. More
participants are simply eager to please. They're getting paid
and fed or might have a crush on the moderator. So, they
might tell her—and the marketing types behind the one-way
mirror—what they think they want to hear, rather than what
they really think.
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What's more, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a
worse environment for eliciting heartfelt and brutally honest
opinions. Getting paid to get together with a bunch of
strangers, and being led in a discussion by another stranger,
is unnatural. In their book Qualitative Interviewing, Herbert
Rubin and Irene Rubin note that focus group leaders don't
have time to build trust, which is a precondition for eliciting
the true feelings of participants. If the discussion turns to
controversial issue—like race or women's role in the workplace
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—many might feel a powerful impulse to self-censor or give
politically correct rather than completely honest answers.
Another conceptual flaw: Focus groups frequently ask people
to make snap judgments about products they haven't seen or
used. "When you ask somebody a question, they'll have an
opinion," said Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist and
managing partner of the Context-Based Research Group. "And
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conduct focus groups, Context focuses on fieldwork. Brinkoff
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Gerald Zaltman agrees. Because focus groups don't reflect
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experience but rather hypothetical choices, "Contrary to
conventional wisdom, they are not effective when developing
and evaluating new product ideas, testing ads, or evaluating
brand images."
But he goes a step further. The real reason people may seem
to "lie" to focus groups is that they simply don't know what
they want. Nor can they readily conceive what they want.
"Standard questioning can sometimes reveal consumers'
thinking about familiar goods and services if those thoughts
and feelings are readily accessible and easily articulated,"
Zaltman writes. But that's a huge "if." "Most of the thoughts
and feelings that influence consumers' and managers'
behavior occur in the unconscious mind." Not irrational, but
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Page 2 of 4
Why everyone lies in focus groups. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
11/25/07 5:20 PM
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behavior occur in the unconscious mind." Not irrational, but
unconscious.
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"Unconscious thoughts are the most accurate predictors of
what people will actually do," Zaltman said in an interview. "In
FEA TU R ED
A D VER TISER LIN K S
the space of 5 or 10 minutes in a focus group, which is the
average airtime per person, you can't possibly get at one
person's unconscious thinking."
So, why do focus groups remain so popular? They are time-
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honored mechanisms with clearly defined costs and that
produce data in a specific time frame. Perhaps most
important, they can be used to validate initiatives or concepts
that the people commissioning the focus groups have already
invested vast resources and time in. Typically, Hollywood
focus-groups endings of films or completed pilots—not
screenplays and development pitches. Ad agencies tend to
focus-group a few ideas they have brainstormed and then
report to the client which one scored best. The primary
function of focus groups is often to validate the sellers' own
beliefs about their product. Focus groups, which are supposed
to explore the psychological needs of consumers, may serve
as much to fulfill the psychological needs of sellers.
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Page 3 of 4
Why everyone lies in focus groups. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
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Press
Secretary's
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Has No
Comment
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Turkey and
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Family?
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