0.6 Focus groups

Introduction

With the technology development well under way and having gained some confidence with the educational consultant, we began our focus on customer acceptance of the concept. The obvious method of testing the product concept was to use focus groups.

A focus group is made up of an invited representative of groups of prospective customers to be introduced to the product concept. Generally a moderator is hired to lead the discussion. The moderator is not emotionally attached to the product concept and is trained not to lead the individuals in the focus group to the conclusions we wanted to hear. In fact, the task at times was to lead them away from what we were hoping to hear to see if the individuals would lead each other back to what we were hoping to hear. Each focus group was made up of 8 to 10 people who would likely purchase the product. In our case these individuals were parents of children in the age range we were targeting the product towards. As the moderator introduced the focus group to the product concept we were behind a one way mirror watching and listening to gain insight of the acceptance (or disapproval) of the concept.

The creative part of this activity was to clearly describe a product concept that did not exist. We chose to use two products with a proposed vocabulary size that we felt would come close to describing what the product would be:

• A cassette tape recorder to play scenarios of how the product might function.
• A pull string toy to could give a feeling for what the product might be like for the child.
• A list of 250 words.

The task of the moderator was to introduce the concept, allow the participants to give frank and honest feedback without leading them. The parents sat around a table with the moderator in front of them presenting the concept using the recorder, pull string toy and other visuals. The one way mirror left us screaming at the mirror on several occasions as the moderator allowed a conversation to go in a direction we didn’t want it to go. But in spite of several of these episodes, we learned a great deal about our product idea. And, we learned a lot about how not to demonstrate the concept of an advanced technology to a group of naive observers. I guess it is unfair to call the parents naive, but I still have memories of the sessions.

In spite of my personal observations and opinions, here is what we learned from the sessions:

• The product would not be reliable.
• The product would be boring and teacher oriented.
• The vocabulary was far too small to be useful.
• The product would be a noise maker.

The first question that comes to mind is how did they come to those conclusions? It begs a second question of what did we really learn from the sessions?

How did they miss the concept?

The answer to the question "how did the come to those conclusions" is much clearer to me now that I have faced this same issue multiple times, as I have attempted to explain the concept of a new technology based product. Many of these new technology based products are the result of creating a way to scratch an itch before the itch is even noticed. In other words, a product that solves a problem that no one even knows they have. This is precisely what we were trying to do with these parents. We were attempting to demonstrate a capability that had never been seen before. The leap from the products we used to the Speak N spell was too far for them to grasp.