Assess Needs & Problems
Assess the needs of your company and define the focus group research objectives. Based on the initial data, we plan our groups for maximum insights.
Focus Sessions
MKOR's team goes in full throttle and starts collecting the most relevant data based on our initial objectives. You'll always receive accurate, actionable information, regardless of your niche.
Deliver Results
We stand by the findings of our research and we guarantee their data. Our reports are easy to read and offer practical, actionable insights for healthy business growth.
How do we define focus groups?
A focus group is a qualitative research tool, that will help you explore customers ideas, thoughts or reactions.
The focus-group is a common research method that too often is being employed for unsuitable research studies. We like to believe that MKOR makes good “qualitative research”, due to the results we obtain, as well as due to the methods we use (specifically to qualitative studies – focus-group or interviews).
What is a focus-group?
“A focus-group is probably the most used form of qualitative research, where a group of persons (preferably between 8 and 15 persons) express their opinions and attitudes regarding a certain product, service, company, package, design.”
The participants are free to express themselves, and the discussion is assisted / watched by a moderator. Focus-groups are a great tool to receive feedback from the public.
This research method has the following advantages:
- The possibility to see and analyse facial expression and body language;
- Information, such as social background, can be drawn out of language collocations used;
- Gives you information that are harder to obtain with other methods;
This method also has disadvantages:
- Small / unrepresentative samples;
- Artificial environment;
- Does not assure anonymity;
- The group can be potentially influenced..
Why should you use focus groups for research?
Here are some relevant reasons to use this method, in order to obtain maximum results.
- The focus-group is suitable if you want to explore customer’s attitudes, perceptions and motivations;
- You can use it in order to understand why the customers react in a certain way when they get in touch with a product, service, advertising message;
- It is suitable if you want to obtain feedback about the product’s design, like packaging, brand;
- It is recommended for deciding what variables you should study further from a quantitative perspective.
Here’s when you shouldn’t employ a focus group consultant
A focus-group is not suitable for making final decision regarding a product or service, to segment the market, to describe the consumer’s profile or to measure efficiency and notoriety. In the first place, you should document this decisions using a qualitative method (focus-group for example), followed by a quantitative method (with a representative number of respondents).
Focus-groups are useful for exploration and orientation, but they will not give you an actual final response. They have to be followed by a quantitative study in order to be valid.
When should you conduct focus groups?
Usually, focus-groups are used for:
- Development studies of new products in order to obtain customer’s reaction regarding a new concept or prototype, thus identifying strengths and weaknesses which help improve the product and offer a starting point for quantitative researches.
- Positioning studies to communicate effectively with your targeted audience about the product, service or brand.
- Customer behavior studies to collect preliminary data about how customers use certain products, prior to initiating a qualitative research.
- Visual element analysis to identify strengths and weaknesses of different elements in the design phase. These results have to be validated with a quantitative research.
- Determining attitudes that customers have regarding a certain product, service or brand.
- Advertising assessment to give information about the efficiency that an advertising material could have.
- Promotional offers assessment to measure the consumers interest and to obtain suggestions or information that can be used to improve them.
- Finding ideas for developing new products or to change already existing products.
- Determining employee’s attitudes and motivations regarding the company they work for and finding new solutions for improving the employee – employer relationship.
In all the mentioned above domains, focus-groups should be validated by a quantitative research. Decisions should not be made taking in considerations only the focus-group results.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t rely on a single group, and you should have more sessions with several groups, in order to obtain a variety of answers that you’ll be measuring in the quantitative stage.
MKOR Consulting has a wide experience in qualitative research area, as well as in quantitative ones. If you need to research your target market or consultancy in this domain, do not hesitate to contact us!
Our focus group clients love working with a dedicated professional research team
Transparent business practices and a dedicated expert team is what sets us apart. Grow your business relying on the results of a professional research. No more guesswork.
Transparent Processes
Dedicated Team
Proven Results
Detailed Analysis
Strategic Insights
Secured Data
10+
Years of expertize in Market Research & Consumer Intelligence
200+
Research projects successfully completed
75+
Clients from Retail, FMCG and other sectors
Recent focus group research projects
Read some stories from our research portfolio to get an idea of what we've worked on. We can take on any kind of assessment project, in every business niche (just as long as you want to conduct the focus group in Romania).
Feeling stuck? Take a look at previous projects and see what our clients said about working with us
MKOR has conducted lots of focus groups across many industries. Our research findings have led to stable growth, defining better business processes, increases in product satisfaction by all of our clients. Our portfolio showcases a few of the projects that we've worked on, feel free to take a closer look, we've prepared a small description for all of them.
In many companies, focus groups research are either conducted by their own marketing or research department or by generalist market research firms. Internally-managed programs can be effective, but most companies lack the specialized expertise that is required to produce optimal results.
Contact us to get more info about our focus group process, every use case is unique.
Clients love working with our agency
We deliver deep research insights, with actionable steps, always on time. Do you want some proof? Read some testimonials, see our marketing & research portfolio and download our public research reports. You will enjoy it 🙂
MKOR's followers receive exclusive market insights!
Subscribe and make sure you don't miss out