Editor’s note: Mia Lorenz is managing director of the Research Academy, London, which offers two of the MRS’s professional qualifications.
Earlier this month, U.S. author and academic Liza Featherstone published a long article in the Guardian vilifying focus groups, and by extension, the market research sector. I rarely take the time to comment on newspaper articles but am compelled to respond to this one. As a provider of vocational training for up-and-coming market and social researchers, I feel that it’s important to set the record straight.
As in other areas of life, there’s always merit in listening to someone you disagree with, and in giving them credit for being right about some things. So, let me acknowledge that the commercial end of the market research industry does in fact serve some very powerful consumer corporations. Whether we like it or not, this means that part of how we make a living boosts the bottom line of companies that may arguably have dubious values, or sell things that don’t improve people’s lives.
But that’s not to say that market research inherently serves only the corporate elite, as Featherstone claims when she says that “traditionally, people have advanced their own interests by organizing and confronting the powerful. They do this by working together in groups. The focus group harnesses this cooperative impulse, but its only result is the production of data that serves the interests of the powerful.” Focus groups – and research methods more broadly – don’t just serve consumerism. They serve the public sector, the charitable sector and companies that aim to do good while making money.
Beyond her somewhat simplistic demonization of the users of market research, Featherstone also seems to hold ordinary people in contempt. I would argue that it is more than a touch elitist to assume that “perhaps (focus group participation) is a process through which our aspirations become much smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened and we demand nothing more.” Do we really demand nothing more just because we took part in a focus group? On what evidence is this claim made? And who does she think these complacent people are? Surely she is not including herself in this category – and if she’s not, why sneer at others?
There are also more serious issues with the quality of her scholarship. She claims, for instance, that “the current culture of consultation has flourished and become more necessary in a period during which the actual power of ordinary people relative to the rich – whether in the workplace or the political arena – has greatly diminished. Listening is not the same as sharing power.” The past few decades have indeed been a period of rising economic inequality. However, Featherstone conveniently overlooks the fact that focus groups took off in the U.S. right in the middle of a period where economic inequality was decreasing thanks to post-war changes such as the New Deal. Moreover, concentration of wealth is not synonymous with consumer culture per se, or with the degradation of democracy. This sort of fallacious thinking weakens many of her arguments.
As I always tell our students, there’s no substitute for critical independent thinking. I wouldn’t go as far as John Parsons does in his rebuttal, in which he concludes that “it’s hardly fair to depict qualitative researchers as unwitting, deluded handmaidens of the corporate stitch-up.” As members of a deeply interconnected human society, surely we can and ought to pause and reflect on the extent to which our day jobs reflect our most dearly held values. Nevertheless, the main thrust of this article, which is that focus groups and market research serve to entrench corporate elites, is specious at best.