Market Research: Focus Groups

When doing research on a market, a way to gather beneficial data is through focus groups. Focus groups are groups of similar consumers in the same target market. This target market is often based on demographics and/ or psychographics. The discussion is centered around consumer perceptions, evaluations, and opinions of a product or service. A trained facilitator leads the discussion. Earlier this year, I was a member of a focus group. The researchers wanted to gather information about downtown Pullman and what would make it more attractive to college students. They wanted to know if downtown Pullman was to add more stores, what kind of stores would attract college students and would we travel into the town center if there were more stores focused towards us. There were seven students in my focus group with five people who were leading the research. We all gave feedback and the leaders recorded the conversations. I found this very beneficial because they were able to hear first hand what college students wanted to see and what would attract them to the town center of Pullman more often. The only thing that seemed a little bias was that it was all girls in the focus group and we were all friends; which lead to us all, for the most part, having the same views of what we wanted to see.