What is a Focus Group?

The point of a focus group:

• To get new information 
• To get an objective for the next stages of the work
• To see how target audience reacts to the product
• To see how well a product is working

Why it might be worth testing our products at this stage:

• It gives us the opportunity to make the products more interesting
• It can help us make any further post production decisions
• It can help us make our products more target friendly

Good ways to test our individual distribution products:

• Video: to show it on the big screen, at a good stage where your intended outcome is recognisable, then chat about it without saying too much
• Digipak: to print it out and put it into realistic packaging and pass round listening intently to peoples comments and questions.
• Website: to go into a computer room, so they can have one each, go onto the site and let them discover it for themselves, to see if it user friendly enough to navigate around.

What our group would like to find out from our focus group:

• How well all the products match up
• Are there any differences in the way that the star image is portrayed
• How much the video keeps their attention
• What impression they get of the band all together 

Our group thinks that the best way to record the focus group is by voice recording, subtly on a phone. We think this as a camera would make the group feel self conscious and will distract from giving their true opinions. We also think we should jot down and main pieces of information that reoccur or stand out.

In our research of focus groups we studied 2 focus groups, discussing how successful they were and what we can learn from them:

1. 

This is a successful focus group, he got all the information he could have needed and from the correct target audience. He was friendly, asking open questions and did a lot of listening. He never looked for a fixed answer, something that we should take into account when holding our focus group. Most importantly he never defended his product.

2.

This was definitely an unsuccessful focus group. They entered the focus group already with the outcome in mind which they wanted to hear and therefore they ignored the comments that challenged their fixed idea meaning that they couldn't learn anything new from holding the focus group. Answers were fed to the group which they agreed with, meaning that the group were prevented from feeding their true opinions. The group took things personally.