Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 2:03 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group
Focus groups make us feel our views matter – but no one with power cares
what we think.
By Liza Featherstone
Feb 6 2018
<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/06/talk-is-cheap-the-myth-of-the-focus-group
>

In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American
housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it.
And so the company approached Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who
had pioneered a new kind of market research, and asked him to find out why.

At the same time, the relatively new processed-food industry was determined
to push ready-made food. Frozen foods had enjoyed a boost during the war
because of tin rationing, and the first frozen ready meals were launched in
1952. More women were working outside the home, making the convenience of
these meals especially appealing. Incomes were rising, too, during this
postwar period, which gave families more money to spend on convenience
items, and on trying out new dishes. Not all such products were new – cake
mix, after all, had been around for decades – but in this postwar climate,
the food industry assumed there would be a much larger market for them. And
yet, cake mix sales were slow.

Dichter, who called his work “motivational research”, set out to answer the
question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for
Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not
doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared
foods made them feel inadequate.

Focus groups, which became widespread in the 50s, could illuminate the
psychological complexities that blocked women’s buying habits. In one focus
group from this period, a woman made a Freudian slip: “Especially when I’m
in a hurry, I like foods that are time-consuming.” Her slip of the tongue,
in the context of the conversation, revealed the woman’s conflicted
feelings about convenience foods, even though she seemed to embrace them.
As the moderator, Alfred Goldman, would later recall in a 1964 article for
a trade journal, that slip inspired the other women in the group to talk
more openly about how guilty they felt over serving prepared foods to their
families.

Dichter was creative at coming up with solutions to the problems that focus
groups revealed. As Bill Schlackman, a colleague of Dichter’s, would recall
years later, in this case the solution was to assuage the housewives’ guilt
by giving them more of a sense of participation. “How to do that?” He
smiled. “By adding an egg.” With this simple adjustment to the recipe,
sales of cake mixes took off. It was an early focus-group marketing triumph.

Focus groups came, over the course of the last century, to shape almost
every aspect of our lives, from cake mix to Barbie dolls. Almost nothing is
launched into the world without a focus group. Since the late 1980s, they
have affected even the political discussions that ultimately determine what
kind of society we can have, not to mention the toothpaste we use, the soap
operas we watch, the news media we consume, and the video games we play.
Focus groups have also 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. Aided by social
media and other technologies, 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.

Focus groups were developed first in academia – by scholars with government
contracts tasked with selling the second world war more effectively to the
American people. Almost at the same time, similar methods were being
developed by the British Labour party, to help them understand why so many
working-class voters were turning Conservative. The intellectuals
responsible for the idea of the focus group – many of whom, like Dichter,
were European, and informed by psychoanalysis – went to work in advertising
agencies, and in firms dedicated to market research, as did their students.
In these commercial settings, they developed the method further. Today,
almost all Fortune 500 companies use focus groups, especially for branding,
public image control and marketing. According to Esomar, a global
market-research association, global spending on focus groups in 2012
totalled about $4.6bn (£3.27bn).

Like Dichter’s egg, the focus group has given us the feeling that we are
participating. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in 1959: “Societies
everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilise their members as
self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilising
the individual for this purpose is through ritual.” If so, the focus group
is a fitting ritual for our market democracy, in which political and
commercial success accrues to those who can win our votes and our consumer
dollars. It also teaches us to reveal just what the corporate and political
elites need us to reveal for these specific persuasive projects, and helps
us to play our assigned roles in a society where only a few people hold
real power.

But what if focus groups have also been part of a process in which
citizenship has been reduced to consumerism – a set of choices made
passively, under constraint? Focus groups reveal our desires – for a better
life, for participation, for power, to be heard – but do they also limit
them? Perhaps it is a process through which our aspirations become much
smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened, and we demand
nothing more.

[snip]

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