Focus Groups

Something I don't always admit to my classmates is that for almost five years (2001-2005) I worked full-time in marketing for Red Bull energy drink.  I dealt with sales accounts, collected market data by talking face to face with consumers, and I sometimes even drove that ridiculous car with the can on the back.  Part of my duties was to conduct "informal" focus groups.  That is, I set up stations at events that somehow met the needs of the participants or employees at the location, (If it was a foot race, I set up a station with comfy chairs, water, and of course, free red bull) ,I gathered groups of people together by enticing them with the station, and I guided them in a discussion about our products in order to pass along data to our headquarters.  My job in these cases was half consumer education and half data collection.  It was extremely important that our discussions never come across as focus groups, but that is exactly how they functioned.  I was to always try to talk to a group rather than an individual and observe their interactions and concerns.  If one person thought that red bull was a high caffeine drink then I needed to wait and see if one of the others had heard otherwise and would correct him/her.  I watched thousands of people read the ingredients and reported back what the most common comments were.  I gave reports on who mentioned the commercials and how they liked them or how many people noticed that Lance Armstrong's helmet had a red bull logo when he won the Tour de France.  I would sometimes ask offhand when was the last time the individual used red bull and for what purpose. When ephedra became illegal sometime in 2002 I got instructions to keep track of the percentage of consumers who asked if red bull contained the illicit substance.  My reports included my estimate of the person's age, their job, where I met them and whether they recommended or condemned the drink to others in the group.  I was gauging peoples reactions for data that I would never be a part of analyzing.
The main limitation of such research is the same as many focus groups.   I was already dealing with a certain subsection of culture:  people who were willing to chat with me while drinking a free energy drink.  We discussed this in class.  You are likely to only gather data from those who are already willing to take part in such a thing as a focus group.  You aren't likely to gather data from the wealthy with a promise of $20 or a free pizza.  When the ephedra scare happened, I noticed a huge decrease in the number of people willing to even touch a free energy drink.  Still, when it worked, I believe, it worked magnificently.  There was real dialogue between people.  A group of students might say to me, "Man, I could use something like this during finals," and bam, we would begin preparing a campaign to get the drink all over campus during finals week.

I mentioned once in class that Alfred Kinsey got around this shortcoming with an approach that is considered highly unethical today (and probably to his contemporaries as well).  He would offer a sum of money to an organization, like a bowling league or church group in exchange for all their members to participate in his surveys.  This was survey research but the same difficulty applies to focus groups. Those who didn't want to be involved simply wouldn't.  Kinsey and his fellow researchers would obtain the roster of whatever organization they were soliciting and would refuse to give them the promised compensation unless every person on the roster agreed to be interviewed.  If there were a few hold outs, then the bowling league or church group or whatever the organization may be, would threaten to kick out whoever didn't participate.  This is a bullshit practice but it yielded nearly perfect sample.  There was almost no one who would refuse to take part in his study.  Because we can't do what Kinsey did we have to deal with the lingering thought that we may always be collecting data on a certain type of person.  Increasing the sample size, variety of locations, types of advertisement for the focus group, even types of compensation, we may reduce our risk of getting the same types of people.
I'm not particularly proud of the research I did with Red Bull, selling something has never felt very fulfilling to me.  It was a job and at least I learned the skills of talking to people, gauging reactions, and collecting data.  I hope that I can use those skills in the future for something more beneficial.