INSIGHTS IN ACTION: THE FGI BLOG
Building a Better (Online) Focus Group
New ideas and spontaneous insights sprout in the “walled garden” of private online communities.
The focus group (online or in person) is a tried-and-true method for gleaning qualitative insight from a subset of your target audience. One of the most attractive benefits of the focus group is the presence of a trained moderator, who can direct and manage conversations so as to target specific questions. The answers to these questions can produce valuable insights that drive marketing decisions and fuel additional quantitative research, both of which ramp up business performance.
But what are your options when you need qualitative reactions from a larger group of people? Or if you’re not exactly sure what your focus should be? What if you don’t even know what issues you need to address? How do you reach your target audience and get them talking freely about what they like, what they don’t like, and what they’d like to see in the future?
For many companies, the answer to this dilemma is to develop an online community. In an online community, your customers can interact not only with a moderator, who sets the ball rolling on precise exercises, but also with each other. This produces dual benefits. First, it lets researchers drill down on specific issues. Second, it provides ample opportunity for community members to raise new topics that may not previously have been considered priorities. Keeping these communities invitation-only allows researchers and their clients a way to interact with customers within the proverbial “walled garden.”
FGI’s suite of community products offers additional twists on the private online research community: the opportunity to run topic-driven sessions for short periods of time to deal with a specific set of concerns, or to run the community as a permanent website that is always available to members. The short-term session is an excellent method both for defining the parameters of an upcoming quantitative study and for identifying future research paths to be explored. Long-term communities, meanwhile, let customers bring up concerns as they arise, allowing businesses to monitor subjective feedback in real time. Each type of online community has specific advantages that respond to different needs. Whether your intent is to keep a constant eye on customer satisfaction or to gauge their opinion on a time-sensitive decision, FGI can help you build a community to satisfy your objectives.
Heather Woodward
Director, Online Research
FGI Research
To learn more about online communities with FGI Research, contact one of our representatives. You can also join FGI’s own SmartCommunity, our proprietary online community where SmartPanel panelists contribute to independent qualitative research and offer their views on the latest trends.