As someone who has spent nearly 20 years observing, leading and analysing focus groups, I found Liza Featherstone’s crushing take on the traditional focus group (The long read, 6 February) to be completely at odds with the world I inhabit. She makes it clear she views the “culture of consultation”, or to put it another way, asking how people feel about things, to be a bad thing. But how can that be? Is it better not to ask? Of course, market research is concerned with increasing the bottom line, reshaping brands and launching new ones. But in my experience, clients are highly receptive to understanding flaws in the service or products that audiences alert them to – not resistant, as Featherstone asserts.
There remains an important role for the traditional focus group in enabling companies, politicians or service providers to observe and listen to the attitudes of the very people they wish to understand better. But let’s not forget focus groups also sit alongside a wealth of other valuable techniques such as ethnography and passive metering which enable us to understand how people behave.
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