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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Focus Groups and Real Life

Here's a postscript to a couple of our entries on this blog - very nice Times article on how politicians confronted with focus groups are a bit startled to find that most people don't care about policies and don't even taken notice of any of the big media stories.

Good on the old focus groups for giving politicians a dose of reality! Whilst it is true that conventional' research does lends itself less well to observing 'naturally occuring' conversations, groups are just quite effective at unearthing attitudes that otherwise would be under the radar. Let's face it, it's pretty unlikely that the silent majority will go online explicitly stating the depth of their ignorance and disengagement.

Trouble is that politicians just like many marketers and media people can live in a bubble in which everyone shares similar preoccupations and there is just a chance that observing online chatter may further feed into this.

Our role as researchers should be to ground strategy in people's real life... using whatever research method is best suited to do so.

Sad but true - politics is a 'low involvement' sector for lots of people - so by all means use 'pull 'research methods to find out what the influential interested minority think but don't forget the 'conventional' push to check out views from those people who don't talk about your subject without being asked first…

Or you'll never find out they have Ed Balls and Ed Milliband down as prominent Tory brothers and name Whoopi Goldberg as a figure in British public life ...

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