What is a focus group

The purpose of a focus group is to trial your products on representatives of the target audience. This way the record label can get an insight into whether the products currently communicate the ideas they are intended to and get ideas of how they can be refined to become more successful. The useful feedback can be divided into two categories:



- Observations that one is unaware of before about how the product
ts may be interpreted by the audience.
- Suggestions about how the products might be further refined to make them more effective

It is important that the focus group is an accurate representation of the audience. For example, if it is created for a children's product it should be made up of both kids and their parents to ensure that the feedback includes opinions of everyone who contribute to its purchase.

In the class we watched The Apprentice episode to infer what are good methods of communicating with a focus group:


These are the aspects that we thought the host was successful at:

- Targeting: the audience representatives included all parties that participated in consumption of the researched product. In this case these were children, who create demand for the good, and parents, who provide finances for its purchase. Thus, the producer received accurate information to work with.
- Depth of details: Because the focus group was small, there was the opportunity to record the feedback with individual details. Thus, the quality of information was higher than it would have been if the firm chose a higher number of focus group members.
- Interaction: the host was friendly in his language and gesture, making the focus group members more open for communication.
- Precision: host did not ask general questions that would not provide him with unclear data.

There was only one aspect that in our opinion would improve this focus group:
- Diversity: the researched product is consumed by children of all ages, thus there could be a greater range of ages among children.