Another Blow to Focus Groups and a Tip for Salespeople

Another Blow to Focus Groups and a Tip for Salespeople

I’d love to be able to tell you that I’m going to write this article about focus groups and I don’t care what you think, but that wouldn’t be true. If you think back over the conversations you’ve initiated recently with people – particularly if you were speaking to someone whose opinion you valued, who you thought of as something of an expert on the matter – what was really at the heart of those exchanges? When you choose to talk about your thoughts on your team’s performance last night, the film you’ve seen, or the new coat you’ve purchased, what are you getting out of such an exchange? It’s likely that, neurologically-speaking, what you’re getting – or at least what you’re hoping and expecting to get – is the pleasure of that expert agreeing with you. Recent research has shown that what other people think, particularly people whose opinions […]

Not Getting Shot and the Magician at Nando’s Restaurant: Retail Review

Not Getting Shot and the Magician at Nando’s Restaurant: Retail Review

I’m quite partial to a bit of magic. Quite a lot of the psychologists I know have a passing interest in the subject. I think it’s all part of a fascination with how the mind works: that balance between our willingness to believe the incredible, it only works if you suspend your disbelief, coupled with the side darker side of human nature – our enjoyment and skill at deceiving others. Of course the fun with magic is wondering how it’s done. Even though we know it’s a trick, and even when you know how a trick is done, it’s still entertaining. If you do know what’s happened you get to swap sides as it were and enjoy the experience as the magician would – the pleasure comes from seeing the other people baffled and amazed. I vividly recall watching a magician on a cross-channel ferry; the room shape wasn’t ideal […]

Why You Can’t Answer 3 Customer Satisfaction Questions

I just bought a new printer.  It’s wireless. Buying it was tricky.  The Amazon reviews of Wifi printers had alerted me to the fact that getting them set up wasn’t necessarily easy.  In the end I selected one that almost everyone said was easy to set up. And it was, sort of. I decided to reconfigure my network a bit, because the last addition to the Wifi set up was temperamental in that way I associate more with pet cats than digital devices. In the end all was well and the printing thing happened from all machines. Until it stopped happening.  The printer interface told me that it was looking for the printer… (grrrr) and then that the printer was off-line (bigger grrrr). The manual had already presumed that I knew the difference between an infrastructure installation option and an ad-hoc one: I didn’t.  It offered no suggestions as to […]

Playing with Market Research

One of the advantages of understanding how the process of asking people questions influences them is that you can have fun demonstrating its impact. I was recently invited to speak to a local business group and took the opportunity to demonstrate the frailty of asking questions and the nature of the unconscious mind. Whilst the samples were too small to be scientifically valid, the differences in responses to my fake research were both predictable and entertaining. I set up a taste test using three very similar products: one was from a value range, one from the ‘standard’ range and one the premium offer.  Everyone was led to believe that they were taking part in legitimate market research and that they all had the same questions. In fact there were five different questionnaires, all asking the participants to taste three products and answer some questions. What was I able to demonstrate? […]