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Did you even look at that data afterwards?

  

In my 15 years in marketing, I’ve seen a lot of focus groups.  I’ve had to recruit for them, write briefs for them, conduct them, spend hours watching them, and, not infrequently, try to prevent the client from getting drunk while watching them.  (If you’ve ever been behind the one-way glass yourself, you know that by the last focus group at 8pm, it’s a miracle if the whole panel isn’t totally loaded through sheer boredom.)

Here is what I’ve learned:

• 99% of the time, focus groups are a waste of money

Oh, I know – you’re thinking I’m a Luddite, or I just didn’t do them right, or I didn’t ask the right questions, or something.

Here’s why I know I’m right:

• In all my years – as a junior ad agency type who had no control over the process or outcome, and as a senior advertising type who supposedly ran the whole thing – I have never seen a focus group overturn whatever preconceived notions the team had before the whole grisly business
• When a focus group ‘insight’ does get used, it’s in exactly the way it wasn’t supposed to be:  as an anecdotal piece of evidence.  “Remember that woman in the focus group who kept saying that she’d never buy cereal in a red box?  That’s why we definitely have to repackage.”
• I have never met a roomful of people more judgemental and dismissive than a bunch of agency types and their client watching a group of people who aren’t like them
• There’s nothing you can learn from $50,000 worth of focus groups that you couldn’t learn by just going out on the street and asking a variety of people what they think of your product.

 

The act of observing changes the observed

In the real world, people who don’t work in marketing don’t think about your marketing concept or your packaging or your Big Idea for more than 5 seconds at a time, and they definitely don’t spend much time analyzing their ‘feelings’ about what they buy.  

Asking them to read a couple of blurbs about your product, then spending 30 minutes discussing their reactions to those blurbs, may give you insight into their reading comprehension and imagination, but it won’t get you even close to an objective assessment of the potential success of your concept.  

(Want proof?  Show a roomful of people a written explanation of 3 concepts, and ask for their thoughts.  Then show them the advertisements that resulted from those concepts and ask them again.  I promise you that their responses won’t be remotely the same.)

The one benefit of focus groups

With only minor exceptions, people who work in marketing are shockingly homogeneous.  We dress the same, listen to the same music, have the same worldviews, and are united in our tacit assumption that anyone who doesn’t work in advertising is significantly less cool (and successful) than we are.  We tend to forget that our purchasing decisions aren’t, in fact, indicative of the rest of the world’s.

Focus groups are a handy reminder that, in fact, there are all kinds of different people out there.  You know, people who manage to get through the day without loving sushi, knowing who Seth Godin is, or wondering when Tindersticks is going to put out a new album.  And while focus groups aren’t going to give you that Killer Insight that will totally transform the way you advertise your product, they may just remind you that the people buying most of that product don’t look (or act) like you.

 

 

…you’re not the target but you watch it twice anyway.

Loved this from DollarShaveClub.com:

 

 

This is a few months old, but it’s crossed my path a few times now:

It’s a nice spot:  The concept is fairly original, the art direction is nice, and they’ve clearly spent some money.

But I can’t help thinking:  Using Bohemian Rhapsody is kind…obvious, isn’t it?  You could pretty much put that song in any context and people would love it, or at least immediately think your commercial was kind of compelling.  

Myself, I kind of prefer a more random song choice:

Or maybe the truth is that I just like ‘Da Da Da’ more than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.  Because that’s true too.

 

 

So I guess Internet Explorer is trying to make itself relevant again:

But I can’t help thinking that it’s a really, really bad idea to associate your outdated product with a whole lot of other outdated products.  It just reinforces the idea that your product is about as relevant as troll dolls.  And the tagline (“You grew up.  So did we.”) is too weak – other than the Explorer logo on what appears to be a tablet computer at the end, there’s no actual evidence presented regarding this ‘growing up’.  And I’m gonna need some evidence, since right now, half the websites I visit look like crap on IE – why would I change?

Maybe I’m missing something here.  After all, I’m a child of the 80s, not 90s, and when diet Pepsi did their ‘Forever Young‘ campaign using a Flock of Seagulls song, I thought it was great – even though I like neither diet Pepsi nor Flock of Seagulls.  The nostalgia worked for me.  

But diet Pepsi isn’t a high-tech product.  If you’re a software-related brand, don’t you want to be seen as cutting-edge rather than charmingly old-fashioned?  

Bad clients can ruin your business.
But only if you let them.

 

A few years ago we won some new business, and we were thrilled:  A branding + website project with a major, internationally-known cosmetics firm.  It was a smallish project, but we were certain it would lead to more work down the road, and did I mention it was a huge brand name?  

(Because let’s face it:  When you’re a small marketing consultancy, it doesn’t matter how much revenue you’ve generated for B2B or smaller clients.  Potential clients are really only interested in whether you’ve worked with brand names with which they’re familiar.)

The project quickly went downhill:  The overall goals, which seemed clear at the outset, suddenly got suspiciously murky; the client team seemed to change every 2 weeks, whereupon the whole project would change; we kept having to fly halfway across the country for meetings which never seemed to go anywhere; and their head office, which was located in another country, took 3 weeks, 10 emails, and 4 phone calls just to approve a URL.

The project was giving us indigestion.  But it was a big-name client, our bills were getting paid, and we were a small company – we couldn’t afford not to do it.  Could we?

 

Sometimes, a client is costing you more than you think.

On the surface we weren’t really losing a lot of money.  

But between all the flying back and forth, the endless meetings, having to request information/feedback/approvals multiple times, and the fact that the goals had turned into unknowable quantum particles, we were losing more than we thought:

• Sure, we were getting reimbursed for the cost of flights and hotels, but our time was part of an overall project fee.  So the ‘downtime’ associated with flying across the country was costing us more than we realized
• The revolving cast of characters on the client side meant we were never going to build the long-term relationships that would lead to additional or referral business
• The lack of strategic direction meant we weren’t going to get to do good work, so our dreamed-of case study was going to look anaemic
• The whole thing was making us feel demoralized, which wasn’t good for our other projects – in marketing you need to maintain a high level of enthusiasm at all times
• We weren’t able to take on other clients, because this project was taking up too much of our time

So one day, after yet another pointless meeting, we called the client and – politely – said that we couldn’t work with them any more.  They seemed surprised – I think their big brand name meant that no one had ever broken up with them before.

 

You may agonize about it.  But 99% of the time, you won’t regret it.

Client relationships are like the other relationships in your life:  Most of the time, if it’s not working for you, it’s not working for the other party, either.  (In our case, we learned later that some of the new members of the client team thought they should have hired a local firm – even though we’d been hired because the original goals called for someone on the ground in Toronto – but didn’t know how to tell us that.)

The whole thing limps along, no one is happy, and the results – if you can even get that far – are spotty at best.

In the 10 years of StayAwake, we’ve only fired a handful of clients – and every single time, we agonize over it, because it always seems as dumb as quitting one job before having another one to replace it.  But every single time, we realize afterward that it was the best thing we could have done for our business:  We’re able to focus on more successful, profitable, and enjoyable projects; we have fewer headaches; and we’re able to do better work in the long run.