A few years back I was part of an online bar fight over the relative value of different market research methodologies. Typical behavior for those of us who care deeply about marketing.

The next Wednesday morning people got some great laughs from Mark Ritson’s blow by blow police blotter summary of the brawl in MarketingWeek. (Ritson’s headline proclamation about ethnography is false in my experience — but he wasn’t part of the argument.)

Of course, I’ve never physically brawled. Still, I was one of the primary participants (along with Byron Sharp and Everard Hunder). All three of us (Byron, Everard, and myself) know these issues matter and are important enough to argue about. So, I respect both men quite highly.

Research Method Must Match the Purpose of the Research.

It was odd to argue solely about a method. Method is not more important than purpose. We must never discuss “best” method without also asking “for what?” Even methods I have grave concerns about (like dial group research) will reveal things that are useful to know. We need extensive, continuing discussions about the relative value and risks of method X vs method Y in order to do Z. We do not need discussions that start with “method X is invalid”.

With this in mind, let’s look more deeply into focus groups — a research method with unusual value too often ignored amid the hype of data (and, god help us, today’s AI).

Why Do We Need Qualitative Research?

Before we can look specifically at focus groups, we need to fundamentally talk about QUALitative research. While managers love the comfort of the numbers from QUANtitative research, all such research is limited because it relies on numbers. Numbers are abstractions or maps which means they eliminate connections in the real world. Only qualitative research allows us to dig deeply into difficult and subtle topics to discover certain nuances which are often the difference between market success and failure. Intriguingly, complexity science work in many fields has led to new emphasis on qualitative research — a topic for a future post.

Worse, I’ve seen a lot of misleading quantitative research from some of the largest companies in the world. Why do they have this research? Dressed up in the trappings of “science,” managers are unable to judge its value. In the broadest sense, there are many product, management, and marketing issues which simply cannot be quantified at reasonable cost, within a reasonable amount of time, or ever – regardless of cost and time. In fact, statistician and business expert W. Edwards Deming observed:

“the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable.”

Qualitative research work helps us dig into, and around, these many issues.

More critically, what matters for customer demand must emerge as potential customers interact and adapt around many forces of product, information, society, and more. Such emergent truths simply cannot be considered in any other form of research. Throughout my long career with new products, we relied heavily on focus groups because we could observe participants to see how interest in a product emerged (or didn’t emerge) and probe how and why that happened.

My Unique View of Focus Group Research

No single type of qualitative research covers all situations — whether focus groups, one-on-one interviews, ethnography, marketing anthropology, or any of the even newer fads.

But rather than offer some complicated list of “use focus groups for X but not Y”, let me discuss what Carla Roberts (Team 360 Consulting) and I achieved with groups. We first worked on a project for Sears. In this first effort we began developing an approach which made our research uniquely perceptive. This approach relied on standard focus group approaches augmented by a critical strategy for using stimuli to learn more than the common “Q&A” focus used by companies. We would, then, spend tremendous time creating a group strategy for recruiting, discussion, and the stimulus. Just turning people lose to “talk” is an incredible waste of research dollars and rarely uncovers what’s truly ground breaking and important..

Our stimulus strategy was designed to explor the impact of ideas. Thus, we did NOT bring in advertising copywriters as it was far more important to clearly and directly discuss the ideas. Advertising work was a subsequent result of this learning and only got in the way of learning what we needed. Further, to encourage free discussion, Carla allowed the groups to follow highly flexible paths. While focused on what we needed to learn, she pursued ideas as they arose and while were fresh for participants — whether we had anticipated their issues or not. In fact, if we had not anticipated issues this non-linear method was more critical. Following THEIR connections also helped us see how ideas connected within their minds. (Stimuli ranged from written material to video, sound, and even physical props.)

Further, where “background discussion” is often separated from presenting products or ideas, we pursued both issues in a single group which helped us see connections between where customers started and their responses to ideas and products

This work also built a shared understanding for the entire agency and client team about what would lead to success. Our work, then, never became stuck in the extended bickering so common among advertising agencies and clients.

Criticisms of Focus Groups

Unfortunately, the scientism or fake science of business mythology wants to claim focus groups are a bad methodology (without every asking “for what”) because they don’t appear as “scientific” as something quantitative. Consider a few claims used to reject focus groups:

Claim: Focus Groups are an Artificial Environment. This is particularly funny because ALL research interferes with the customer’s life — especially the endless stream of net promoter score surveys asking how likely we’d be to “recommend the product (or service) to a friend.” Since all research interferes with customer life, we must always know how that affects our ability to learn what we need to know. In fact, the way in which specific research interferes with life is critical in our process choosing best research method. Despite ethnographic enthusiasts claiming “we go into people’s homes to see them in their natural environment,” no home with a researcher present is a “natural environment.” Fortunately, customers understand this (better than researchers do) and try to offer valid insights. If we carefully design our work aware of the potential to skew results, we prevent errors.

Claim: Participants influence each other. Of course they do — it’s what we want. If we didn’t want this influence we wouldn’t bring them together in groups. Focus groups RELY ON the complex interactions of customers — feedback loops which lead consumers to be far more articulate about issues than they would be in individual interviews. Through my work with complexity science I’ve concluded that these feedback loops are a powerful result of human evolution — they evolved as a particular human power. In a group, then, a first person responding to an idea leads a second person to respond with what the first response stimulated in their mind, and a third person reveals ideas it raises for them — and suddenly we learn about deeply buried truths impossible to find in individual interviews.

Claim: Individual interviews are more cost effective. This is claim comes from a limited set of “scientific studies” comparing focus groups with individual interviews. Despite these studies carrying an “MIT” imprimatur they look only at one narrow application — using research to build lists ideas for product change. While these found longer lists were developed more cheaply with individuals interviews, I’m dumbfounded that anyone thought customer research OR focus groups were good for “idea lists.”  ANY company using research merely to generate idea lists has already lost the battle. This claim, then, is meaningless.

Claim: Focus groups only provide a few minutes for each participant to talk – and that’s bad (apparently). Uh. Erm. The goal for research is to learn important things. Any number of “minutes per participant” is entirely unrelated to whether we learn something important. The QUALITY of what we learn from each participant’s minutes matters — not the number of minutes. Of course, that can’t be measured (ever) so only faux science might investigate the issue. Quality is critical in all research. For example, I find that 90% of the minutes spent in ethnological research are “wasted” according to this idea except that, done right, the remaining 10% often makes the difference between company or project success and failure..

What Focus Groups Do Better Than Any Other Research

All research methodology is valuable used for the right purpose. Here are some key values of focus groups:

Focus groups leverage the human feedback loop — where one person’s ideas lead others to discover even more important ideas. These loops are so potent that two people working as a team can deliver far more than twice the value of each working on their own..

People are more comfortable talking about delicate subjects in focus groups  A one-on-one discussion in an intimate situation (like a home or a one-on-one interview) leads respondents to clam up when asked direct, intimate, or sensitive questions. These perfunctory answers are not the truth. Within group dynamics, though, no participant is put on the spot. As the group discusses a topic participants can chime in with how they see it. This reveals far more than we’d discover in any one-on-one situation.

We obtained a view inside the heads of research participants. Observed behavior is not enough for marketing action to drive profit as we also need learn about how people think. As marketers we need to understand how to persuade, how to help lead customers to choose our products, how to evaluate and trade-off the product options we are considering, etc… Those questions are equally important with behavior. Observing focus groups, we watch, listen, read body language and even add new information to the discussion in real time — so we’re able to thoroughly observe how different things impact people and their psychology.

Focus groups give participants time to think. Participants in research are NOT able to instantly express what they comprehend — that takes time. One-on-one interviews would be filled with awkward silences if we gave participants enough time to think. A tremendous value of focus groups is that it allows each participant natural breaks to think about their own ideas. While one person talks, other participants partly hear what is being said but also think about it up against their own sense. Net out, they articulate things we’d never hear in one-on-one’s or find in ethnographic work.

Focus groups are brilliant used with valuable stimulus, Somehow, companies today often believe it is enough to “ask questions.” But that’s not the way the human mind works. To learn about potential customers, we should rely heavily on stimulus making discussion far more useful. In my work we would spend weeks preparing stimulus — but not word-smithing like copywriters. Instead, we developed concepts taking participants through important ideas — expressed in words, artwork, and video. Using this technique always led to important and unexpected new discoveries.

Learn how customers perceive their behavior. It’s commonly observed that “consumers don’t do what they say”. Of course, not — they are human. This isn’t a great insight despite being an appropriate caution to corporate managers who would rather customers were entirely logical. Groups allow us to learn how customers PERCEIVE what they do. These perceptions give us the hooks to decide, for example, how product features lead to a product which sells better or which gives us opportunity for the most persuasive language in our marketing communication.

Focus groups are a learning medium. Consumer research should focus on learning if it is to (a) sell more profitable product or (b) avoid wasting money. Even engineering based customer research MUST have this ultimate goal. Focus groups are brilliant in that they allow us to learn, adapt, and grow our discussions as we proceed through a sequence of sessions.

Embrace the Unique Powers of Focus Groups

All companies, ad agencies, market researchers, and marketers will drive better customer sales and satisfaction if, at the right time, they use the unique opportunity brought by focus groups. And, it is critical today that we reject ALL ideas of pseudo-research participants generated by AI. These participants are statistical ideas embedded within code — developed from (a) past information and (b) only the data already available. In other words, they reflect the past and cannot help companies learn their way forward.

To leverage the power of research, though, those funding research must take tremendous care to hire the right experts to execute focus groups and keep expectations in line with the valid findings generated from the groups.

Remember, also that this same care must go into any and all research — whether qualitative or quantitative, whether ethnography or focus groups. No research delivers the uniquely important insights which make a tremendous difference for a business without that care.

And, as a final note, please fight back with every research project against research mediocrity— those studies which carefully follow “best practices” without uncovering results that are truly important. The true value of research comes by discovering paths to future competitive advantage.

©2026 Doug Garnett — All Rights Reserved

Doug’s book about the value of complexity science and business success will be published by Columbia Business Press later in 2026. Through his company, Protonik LLC, Doug Garnett consults with companies as they design and bring to market new and innovative products. He has taught marketing, consumer behavior, and advertising at Portland State University since 2001.

You can read more about Doug’s unusual background (math, aerospace, supercomputers, consumer goods & national TV ads) at www.Protonik.net. Doug is a member of the RetailWire.com braintrust where he engages discussions of retail challenges. And, together with his podcast partner Shahin Khan, current issues in marketing and business are discussed on The Marketing (And Everything Else) Podcast — available on Google, Spotify, the OrionX website, and Apple Podcast.