Focus Groups: Getting Started

Have you seen the movie "Daddy Day Care," with Eddie Murphy? He works at an advertising agency, testing new breakfast cereals for kids. In one scene, he's sitting in a small room with a bunch of school-aged kids, testing a vegetable-flavored cereal. A bunch of executives are watching the children through two-way, hidden mirrors, and they're anxiously scribbling notes on clipboards as the kids try the new cereal.

In the movie, the kids HATE the vegetable-flavored cereal, but that scene nicely shows a focus group in action. The kids ARE the focus group.

The company is going to sell their cereal to people who buy cereal. They want to make cereals that people will buy-so they need to test the cereals on the people who will eat the cereal. In this case, they tested the cereal on kids. New baby products are tested on babies and parents of babies. New cigarettes are tested on smokers, new trucks are tested on truck drivers, and new cat food is tested on, well, cats. The world of product testing is fascinating, and this book will explain how you can become a part of it.

Those kids in that fictional scene from "Daddy Day Care" were being paid to be a part of that focus group. Marketing and research companies pay ordinary, every day people to be in focus groups-groups of people who will test the products before companies put them on shelves in stores to sell.

For $60, a company may invite you to their testing offices to spend 90 minutes trying different frozen dinners, so that they know which ones taste best and will sell well. For $50, you might be asked to spend 40 minutes in an online chat room looking at travel pictures on a web site and giving your opinion of the images-do they make you pick one travel agency over the other? In other words-the companies pay you for your time in exchange for your opinion, so they can pick the product that will make them the most money.

Focus groups are not new. They've been around since advertising took off in the United States in the 1920s. Companies have always wanted the opinions of their buyers-cosmetic counters give away free samples (and judge how well a perfume is selling by how many samples they give out vs. new sales the next week), you can get free samples of food at your grocery store (and sometimes you buy a box of the tasty sausage, pizza, or dessert), and you sometimes get phone calls asking for you to do a brief survey on politicians, bottled water, or your local radio station.

In each incidence you're part of a focus group-you're just not getting paid for it.

To learn more about focus group opportunities, look in your phone book for companies under "Market Research," or use an Internet search engine and search for "[your city] focus groups."