Editor’s note: Mike Flynn is president of Flynn Consulting, a St. Louis research firm.

How many times have you sat in a dark room looking at eight to 10 people on the other side of a one-way mirror and thought, “These people know too much. I wonder how many times they have been in a focus group. Where do they get these terms like ‘target audience’ or ‘copy’?

It’s tempting to blame the recruiter for professional respondents. Or perhaps the respondents lied to get in. We have all seen it happen. And we want to point the finger someplace.

But perhaps we are fighting an uphill battle. The fact of the matter is we are living in a much savvier world than when focus groups were first being used. Indeed, the term “focus group” has become part of the everyday vocabulary. We hear the term used by the media and political aides. We see focus groups parodied in editorial cartoons. We know that they help select what a candidate will say in a speech and how a movie will end. We might also be aware that they are used to try out legal arguments before a case ever makes it to a courtroom.

When I tell people at a cocktail party that I moderate focus groups, I do not need to give further explanation. Although they might not have participated, they know the general concept.

Focus groups and their major variations (IDIs and mini-groups) have become a part of the mainstream, not only of marketing and public policy research, but of the working knowledge of the reasonably well-informed.

Ask them to collaborate

We cannot move back to the days of naïve respondents. Indeed, the word “respondent” is passé. A better word, now used more often, is “participant.” So rather than treating people as subjects to be observed or as unsophisticated reactors to questions the moderator poses, we ought to ask them to collaborate in our investigation.

Now this means that we might need to think differently about focus groups. As most marketers know by now, focus groups are not the place to take votes on a new product, an ad, or anything else. I like to think of qualitative research, and focus groups in particular, as a dialogue with people who have some firsthand experience with the subject in question. It is a forum for finding useful ideas. It is a conversation with people who have a perspective on a topic, one different from our own and one that deserves to be heard.

To assume that focus group participants are unsophisticated is to be arrogant. They have more knowledge than we do about their own experience. That is why we tell them that there are no right or wrong answers. So we need to respect them and solicit that knowledge. As Wendy Gordon says in Goodthinking: A Guide to Qualitative Research, “People can be willing problem-solvers, especially those who have relevant experience to contribute.”

How, then, do we engage participants in problem-solving? There are a number of contexts in which we conduct qualitative research where we already ask participants to help us:

  • interactive workshops where we ask people to experience the product and help us make it better,
  • creativity groups where we use people in ideation sessions, or
  • accompanied shopping trips, where we ask people to think aloud as they shop.

Other contexts

We can learn some principles and tips from these other contexts for qualitative research that we can apply to focus groups.

The first is attitudinal. Good moderators have respect for participants as individuals. When we think of participants as collaborators, our attitude is a bit different. The moderator needs to treat the participants as colleagues in the hunt for ideas and solutions, as co-investigators. We should say implicitly, “Come let us explore together.”

Ah, but you say, “Respondents can’t do this. They haven’t been trained.” To be sure, not every participant will provide brilliant thoughts or observations. But many can, and we ought to expect contributions from everyone. A great deal of research in schools and the workplace has shown that people live up to expectations. If we expect helpful ideas and perspectives, we are more likely to get them.

Rethink roles

We also need to rethink the roles of participants and moderator. If we allow and encourage participants, they can take on the role of problem solvers of marketing issues. The thought might make some people cringe. We often have heard unsolicited comments from participants about new product ideas or how to improve copy. These kinds of comments can be way off base and not particularly helpful. However, a good moderator will want to understand what is behind a particular suggestion. Oftentimes we will get real insight into how a particular target is experiencing a brand by the kinds of suggestions they make about marketing issues. If we ask for suggestions, it will increase our chances of understanding how a target experiences a brand and we might even have an idea or two that we can actually use.

Another role participants can play is that of observer. If we think of each participant as an embedded reporter, we have that many more eyes and ears available to us. This is particularly helpful in developing hypotheses about market segments. Not too long ago I was moderating some groups and asked them about the different kinds of cooks (home cooks, not restaurant) they knew. From their responses, we were able to develop a typology of cooks that seemed intuitively correct. Of course, it needed quantitative validation, but it became a framework for how the client thought of the market.

Or one could ask veterinarians about the different kinds of pet owners. Or service station operators about how people treat their automobiles and get them serviced.

Participants can also be helpful observers of behavior. In a recent project where we were investigating a brand of children’s toy, we asked mothers how the children played with the toy at home: the kinds of games, who else played, how they used their imagination, how often they played with the toy, where the toy was kept, the name of the toy and so forth.

Of course, we more frequently ask people to report on their own behavior. One way to do that is to ask them to keep a diary for a week or a few days before the group discussion itself. Several years ago, we did a study of teens where we asked them to keep a diary for a day. We distributed the assignment so that some participants kept track of their time on a weekday, others on a weekend day. The diary was divided into half-hour increments. They kept track of what activity they were doing and what media they were using throughout the day. The diaries then became fodder for the discussion in the focus groups. One interesting finding from the study was that teens viewed music itself as a medium, regardless of whether they hear it on the radio or a CD. This is certainly consistent with the popularity we see today of MP3s and file sharing.

Another role participants can play is that of interpreter. An advantage to collecting comments on an easel pad is that we can refer back to what people have said throughout the course of the discussion. There are two ways this can be helpful. One is that it can help the moderator clear up any inconsistencies in participant comments. An oft-used technique is for the moderator to say, for example, “Well let me check. [referring back to the flip chart] Earlier you said that you thought of this brand as old-fashioned, but now you are saying the colors on the label are bright and more up-to-date. Help me understand this.” The result is that participants end up interpreting their own comments.

The second way participants can be interpreters is in finding trends or themes. Say the moderator has collected likes and dislikes at the easel. To use the participants as interpreters here, the moderator simply needs to say, “Do you see any trends or themes in these likes or dislikes?” This kind of interpretation can function as a kind of projective technique where what we are really learning is how participants organize their thinking about a particular issue. It helps us understand the meaning that people bring to things and that, after all, is an essential purpose of qualitative research.

Moderator takes a different role

When participants are viewed as collaborators, the moderator ends up taking on a different role. Rather than being the conductor of the orchestra, the moderator becomes more like the concertmaster, having a leading role, but participating in the process. This new role may be uncomfortable for some moderators and it might also make for less entertaining viewing from the back room. However, participants will be more comfortable and their comfort is more likely to lead to revelations.

Up to the analyst

Of course, it is ultimately up to the analyst to put all of the participants’ comments into perspective. Regardless of how sophisticated participants are, we cannot assume that everything respondents say can be taken at face value. Just like other qualitative data, the contributions of participants as collaborators need to be interpreted; the gold needs to be panned from the mud and rocks. A good moderator will do exactly that.