Qualitative research: opium or inspiration?
Do the opinions of ordinary people really matter, asks John Lowery
What is the point of qualitative research? Something akin to the supply of unlimited opium to the people, if Liza Featherstone’s new book – Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation – is to be believed.
Drawing heavily on her experience in the USA, the gist of the author’s argument is that, “Focus groups have helped to create and nourish a seemingly boundless culture of consultation, in which ordinary people weigh in on just about everything, before the people in charge make a decision…the scope of such consultation has, in recent years, expanded its reach with breathtaking speed, allowing companies to aggregate the views and feelings of millions of potential customers”. And, in so doing, “it is a process through which our aspirations (to participate) have become much smaller.”
Crikey. That’s one helluva claim. Focus groups have helped undermine democratic participation. Has anyone at ESOMAR been indicted yet?
In support of her argument, Featherstone notes that some 218,000 focus groups were conducted in the US in 2002. (I’m not really sure why she’s using data from the dim and distant when she talks of ‘recent years’ but let’s roll with it.)
Assuming that the average attendance per group was 8 respondents, that makes for about 1.74 million attendees. Census data reveal that there were 287.63 million people living in the States in 2002. Ignoring the fact that many of the respondents are likely to be serial attenders, that makes for 0.61% of the population. To put that into even sharper perspective, the population of the US grew by more than 2 million between 2001 and 2002, meaning the proportion finding themselves in one of those viewing locations almost certainly diminished.
Moreover, conservative estimates put the percentage of Americans regularly attending church at over 50%.
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So, if you’re one of the 71 Marxists living in the USA (the Pew Research Centre doesn’t provide accurate data) you’d be better continuing to direct your revolutionary ire at religion rather than focus groups. About 80 times better.
Having completed that, admittedly rudimentary, quantitative scrutiny of Featherstone’s thesis, it suddenly dawned on me that embedded within her argument is, in fact, the answer to the question: what is the point of qualitative research?
“…ordinary people weigh in on just about everything, before the people in charge make a decision.”
And that is exactly how it should be.
If I had a pound for every time I’d heard and disregarded a respondent in a group saying, “People would be more likely to buy that lavatory descaler if Scarlett Johansson recommended it,” or “It would be better if the laptop casing was luminous lime green, that way you’d be able to find it under your sofa,” or “The pub would get more customers if they played a thumping tropical-house music mix,” then I’d be writing this piece on a sun-drenched beach in the Caribbean rather than in a freezing flat in London.
To borrow from John Legend, ordinary people “don’t know which way to go”.
If they did they’d be writing adverts like Walter Campbell, designing products like Jony Ive, and running pubs like Simon Emeny – for far less money than those guys get paid.
But that doesn’t mean the opinions of those ordinary people don’t matter. Far from it. It means that they matter in a different way.
In the mid 90s, before Tom Wolfe began work on his novel A Man in Full, he decamped to Atlanta for several years to immerse himself in the world of real estate, finance, meat packing warehouses, stud farms, prison life, society parties and racial politics. He engaged in the process James Webb Young, in A Technique for Producing Ideas, described as the “workman-like job of gathering material”.
Wolfe didn’t ask any of the ordinary (or extraordinary) people with whom he talked to help construct his narrative arc and he didn’t ask them what they thought of his portrayal of the bovine Charlie Croker.
Instead he allowed what he heard, saw, smelt and felt to percolate and subsequently provide him with inspiration. And, as the man in charge of A Man in Full, he made the decision; the right decision as it turned out – 750,000 hardback copies were sold within a month of its publication.
For the most part qualitative research addresses issues way less lofty than the writing of a novel dissecting America’s obsession with greed but that is the point of qualitative research – the workman-like gathering of material. Or at least it should be. That material should then percolate in the minds of the people in charge – the moderator and the folk on the other side of the mirror. Then, inspired by what they’ve heard, they should make the decision.
Of course, no one can guarantee it will be the right decision but by listening to ordinary people it’s more likely to be.
In conclusion then, congratulations Liza Featherstone on achieving the remarkable feat of being both spectacularly wrong and exactly right.
John Lowery is a marketing consultant who has worked both agency and client side
His most recent, contribution to the world of marketing was the strategy that yielded the #LidlSurprises campaign