How Focus Group should be organised.

Firstly, business needs to choose an appropriate targeted group of people, according to their age, gender, knowledge and usage of the product. When selecting participants, business (moderator) needs to choose those people who they can discuss advantages, disadvantages, and all trends of the product with. These should be the people who can provide high quality information which is relevant to their research. In other words, businesses need to be looking for those participants, who suit their target consumers.

When selecting participants in order to discuss my product, I will be choosing only those people, who do swimming and who are interested in having mp3 player build into their swimming goggles. I believe that these people will be more likely to provide with relevant ideas about new product, will be able to discuss potential advantages and disadvantages of the new iGoggles, and suggest what strategy would be best to use for advertising my new product. Usually, big businesses use huge data bases, which contain specific information, such as people’s lifestyle, preferences and etc. of a large number of consumers. By looking at characteristics of particular people, those participants can be selected, who suit businesses requirements best. In addition to this, in order to make it easier to select the right participants, a business can make a list of participants with desired characteristics.

If Apple, for example, wanted to introduce my new product and would like to find out more about what people think about it, Apple could have encouraged professional swimmers and those people who do swimming for leisure to come and discuss it with them. By encouraging professional swimmers, they would find out whether or not they would like to have a new product and what from their point of view are the main strengths and weaknesses of a new product. By encouraging to come those people who do swimming for leisure, it might give Apple an opportunity to compare two types of consumers professionals and normal swimmers and see whether they tastes and preferences change. For example, professional swimmers might not like the new idea of having swimming goggles with an mp3 player build in; as they can’t listen to the music whole they are participating in certain competitions. By using them, they would simply lose their concentration, but if they swim while they’re training, or swim for leisure, then they might consider it to be a good idea, as they don’t need high level of concentration.

I live and study in the school. Therefore, when I will be using focus group methods, I will be selecting those students who are in the school swimming team and who would like to buy and use my new product. I’m also going to encourage about 4-6 people in my group. The reason why I’m doing this is because if I encourage more than 6 people into my focus groups, it will be make the process more complicated. I will need to ask more people, it will take longer time to do it, and it will be more difficult to analyse data gathered from them. I believe that it’s better to obtain a better quality data, rather than quantitative. Another, very important aspect when selecting the applicants for focus group is that they should be in mixed gender and age. I will only have an opportunity to do it in the school, which means I will not have an opportunity to ask people of different age, which might make my research inaccurate. However, I can encourage people with different genders.

When working as a moderator or a person who asks the questions and organises the discussion, which I will be, I that I try to stimulate the discussion and motivate the participants to discuss the problems by themselves, only putting them in the right direction and starting the discussion of only those topics, which can be related to the research. I think it would be better to start off the discussion by talking about general topics and asking the participants some general questions, in order to make them think and concentrate their attention on particular topics. When talking about some general topics, it might be sometimes good to mention specific areas of the topics, which will be discussed later on. In addition to this, after introducing ourselves to each other, it would a good idea to do some brainstorm exercises. I’m going to put the titles of the main topics, which I will discuss with participants, on the A4 sheets of paper, and ask them to put as many of their ideas, which can be relevant to the topic, as they can. This might also give the participants some kind of exercise, so they will know what to talk about. This also encourages group work, and will make the participants discuss their ideas together. After all topics that were supposed to be discussed, are covered, I will go into the final stage, where I will be asking participants to provide me with some extra ideas about the new product and they ways, in which it can be sold.

When selecting the place for the discussion, this place has to be geographically convenient for all participants. For example, it might be located in the office, which is close to the bus or underground stations. This will make it easier for participants to find the place and will make sure, that participants come on time. The facility should also be big enough to access all participants and express good impression or express the image of the company. In some cases, it would useful to have waiting room and rooms, equipped with sound recorders or video cameras, so the data can be further analysed. Generally everything should be done, so participants feel comfortable when assessed, and so it’s easy to obtain and analyse gathered data. If the business wants to have more detailed information, is very serious about the discussions, the results and the reasons why some participants gave certain answers to particular questions, data and psychological experts can be encouraged to do a further analysis of work. However, this would lead to higher costs for the business to do the focus group session.

I will be doing my focus group sessions in the classroom in the school, which means it will be relatively convenient for participants to come to this place. This place is big enough for all participants, is well equipped with a certain number of available computers, projector, and the screen, which means I can also do some presentations, in order to attract participants’ attention to a particular topic. However, there are some limitations in my method, because only students and teachers have an access and opportunity to come to this classroom in order to have a discussion.