Think you could handle focus group moderation?
Have you ever wondered how emotions shape group discussions?
Today we are diving into the unpredictable world of focus groups and how a professional moderator can guide the conversation!
Don’t underestimate the power of skilled moderation, it’s the key to unlocking genuine insights!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:01)
I’ve been a professional focus group moderator for a long time, but I’ll never forget the first time I was part of a professional focus group. Many years ago, I had the opportunity to assist in administering my first ever focus group at a pediatric hospital. And David Rich, the president of the research and planning group at the time, had graciously allowed me, a fresh-faced new intern, to join in as his assistant and observe the study. We don’t normally hold these focus groups at the hospital, he warned me once I arrived.
He was busy setting up the group in an executive boardroom, and a videographer was working around us running cable and setting up cameras and microphones around the table so observers would be able to view a remote video stream in the next room. And I don’t like doing focus groups in boardrooms because the chairs are too big and the participants usually feel uncomfortable, he said. But today’s groups are very different from what you’ll see anywhere else because we’re going to be talking to families who have had their children in the NICU. What’s the NICU, I asked?
The Natal Intensive Care Unit, he explained, it’s where babies wind up if they’re born premature or have difficulties. They can spend weeks or months in the NICU before they’re released, and it’s a very emotional experience for the parents. They often wind up living in the hospital and putting their lives on hold while they wait for their baby to get better. And, he continued, I’m going to be completely honest with you. I have no idea what sort of people are going to be in this group tonight.
We could have parents whose child actually died in an EQ, and that’s one of the reasons that the client wanted to hold this group at the hospital, because they thought it might be easier for those parents to come here and talk about this experience than to do it in a focus group facility. But I, on the other hand, David continued, I think it’s a terrible idea to include families who have been through that. And so I need you to do me a favor tonight. We may need to excuse some of these families if they’re having too much trouble participating in the focus group.
So I’m going to give you these envelopes. Each one is filled with their cash incentives for being here tonight. And I want you to watch me very carefully over the video feed because you’re going to be observing in the next room. If I give you the signal, I want you to come into the room, tell them they’re needed outside and to bring their things, and then to hand them one of these envelopes and thank them for being here and then show them out. Because I don’t want to put them through that and they won’t be able to get past the emotion of losing a child.
in order to participate in a focus group. Well, I must have looked even more nervous as I thought about the prospect of escorting out a focus group participant who was in the midst of having an emotional breakdown, because then David added, now don’t worry, it probably won’t come down to this. If I sense something is wrong, I can shut the person down from speaking too much, call a break, and then excuse them before we start back up. But I still need you to be ready so we can try and save the group.
I agreed and he continued on with his preparations for the group. I was already feeling a lot of pressure to be a useful observer and research team member and now I also had to be ready for this. It was going to be an interesting night and as I realized I had 12 envelopes with over $1,000 in cash now sitting in my suit jacket pocket, I wondered how many of them I would be distributing to mothers or fathers who had endured a successful outcome from the NICU and how many would be leaving tonight in tears.
remembering the death of their child. Fortunately, it didn’t come down to any of that. David was a pro, and he got the people through the group without anyone getting angry or losing control of their emotions. Everyone seemed grateful to share their stories, and the research was a success. Fortunately as well, none of them had lost a child. Even so, this is a great place for us to start in our discussion of focus groups, because focus group research has a tendency to be wild and
unpredictable in ways that other methods of qualitative or quantitative research are not. There’s something about getting together groups of participants that can really turn your session into a powder keg of emotion. And one of the reasons that focus groups are such a popular research method among non-researchers is because they can become very dramatic and engaging simply because of the group dynamics present in the room. And it’s in those moments you really want to have a professional guiding the group along. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The focus group is a very conventional method of qualitative research used to hear what a group of people think about whatever topics being put in front of them. Usually, a group’s going to be made up of about 8 to 10 people, but some can go bigger and some can go much smaller. The method is traditional. It’s been around since at least the 1930s in some form or another, but it’s also not exactly what I’d call rigorous. One of the biggest problems with focus groups, in fact, is that they simulate a group discussion
but don’t give the individuals in the group a lot of time to talk. Most people only get to speak for about seven to 10 minutes in total, and some people will speak way more than that if you let them. That’s okay though, because usually focus groups are designed to produce some surface-level data over the course of just a couple of hours, which makes them ideal for observation and for talking about a broad topic. You can’t presume everyone in the group has an equally informed opinion about your topic of discussion though.
and some people are naturally more likely to volunteer their opinions than others are. But because focus groups resemble a normal business meeting, and many of us are used to running those kinds of meetings, there are a lot of folks who believe that hiring a professional focus group moderator isn’t necessary, and they’ll try to run focus groups on their own instead. Now, I’m saying this as a professional moderator myself, if you wanna go that way, good luck and godspeed, because I am not gonna tell you that you shouldn’t.
Focus groups aren’t rocket science, and if you’re good at keeping a group of people talking about a topic for two hours, you may be a reasonably good moderator even without training. What I’d rather do is talk about when you do want to call in a professional and why. So let’s start with some reasons why you might want to do a focus group in the first place. Focus groups basically work like this. You bring a group of people into a room, you have a moderator guide a detailed discussion,
about one or more topics and maybe have a method for allowing observers who are viewing through one-way glass or a video stream to send in some additional questions. But why you’re holding that group may shape the conversation. When I’m teaching qualitative research to future marketing research professionals, I generally break focus groups down into four general uses. There’s idea generation, concept testing, discussion, and then feedback or voice of the customer.
Idea generation is all about getting the group to brainstorm ideas. It’s really useful for sorting out the resonant ideas from some of the less resonant ones, and it can encourage people who aren’t normally creative to come up with fun new concepts. The problem is that focus groups tend to fall in love with their own ideas, and they don’t always come up with things that are actually useful. What’s more, those ideas are often not very well thought out and might not even be feasible.
Concept testing is used for all sorts of things, from showing off rough concepts to having people respond to finished prototypes or products, or even conduct things like taste tests or product demonstrations. This can be useful because it allows people to share their initial reactions and then go through some discussion to refine them as they think about the topic at hand, but that’s exactly the problem, too. People tend to shape their opinions based on what others think and feel, and it’s very easy for them to say things that aren’t what they actually think, but what they think the group or moderator wants to hear instead.
Discussion about a difficult or complex topic is a classic use for public policy focus groups or evaluating positioning or brand concepts, and focus groups can help uncover a lot of angles and related topics that an internal audience has never even considered. You see, discussion groups used a lot in political seasons to try to find good keywords for messaging, or to allow participants to express their candid feelings about particularly resonant topics or issues.
Lawyers might also use these to simulate jury discussions to try to understand how their arguments might fare in court. And they’re also great for hearing about situations where there’s controversy or misunderstanding so you can get a sense of what the word on the street might sound like. You can even see how thoughts and ideas evolve in the course of discussion.
But the weakness of discussion groups is that participants aren’t necessarily reflecting reality. After all, how often in life do people really sit down and discuss things these days instead of arriving at opinions on their own and then arguing about them?
The results can be really misleading. The fourth kind of group that I mentioned is the feedback or voice of the customer group. And while I’m not going to go into a lot of discussion about those in this particular episode, what I do want to say is that they can be very useful for uncovering customer service opportunities or flaws, but they also tend to turn into gripe sessions. And so you have to be very careful about how you administer them.
So with these four uses of focus groups in mind, let’s also talk about some of the potential pitfalls. I’m going to cover six issues that can crop up, which include polarization, group think, group leader, contrarian, literal mindedness, and moderator bias. Polarization is when the group divides into two sides and becomes argumentative. It’s a problem that can bring an end to discussion and even create hard feelings among group members. Group
think, on the other hand, is the opposite. It’s when everyone falls into a single-minded position and agrees on everything. Group leaders are participants who take on a position of authority within the group so that other participants fall in line behind them. Often, this is not a conscious phenomenon, and group members might not even realize that it’s happening. Contrarians are the opposite of that. They tend to take a contrary position and disagree with everything.
sometimes positioning themselves as the voice of reason or the devil’s advocate. They can be helpful if you need to break up groupthink, but they can also be really disruptive if other members of the group begin to dislike them. Literal mindedness comes from participants who are plain spoken and who struggle with metaphors, analogies, figurative language, or abstract thinking. This can be quite difficult when you’re trying to get people to respond to things that are not what you see as what you get sorts of stimuli or discussion points.
Moderator bias comes from participants who perceive the moderator as an authority figure and begin agreeing with them or even flattering the moderator. They tend to want to please the moderator with acceptable answers, and they’re so compliant the moderator may unconsciously select them more often to speak because they’re expressing opinions in line with the goals of the study. These six issues aren’t too hard to spot when you’re outside of a focus group, but when you’re in the room with the individuals,
it’s also extremely easy to encounter them without even realizing that they’re happening. That’s because focus group moderators are generally thinking about the flow of the group and the discussion and the quality of what’s being said, and it’s easy to have these six issues creep into the discussion without realizing how detrimental they might be to your actual results. And when you are concerned that these problems may harm the research you’re trying to conduct, that’s when it’s best to call in the professionals, especially if you’re asking about a sensitive topic
Or you’re talking about something where you’re planning on spending millions of dollars on a concept.
I often explain this to my own clients this way. If you’re just trying to hear some perspectives from the public and there’s not much on the line, professional focus groups are probably overkill. But if you have a big decision you’re trying to make or you’re trying to get to the root of a really big issue, a professional moderator can save you a lot of time and trouble. How? Well, first of all, because professional moderators are trained not just in the art and science of asking questions, but also…
and ensuring that the group dynamics that are supposed to be happening are evolving properly, and that issues such as polarization or group think aren’t taking root. Professional moderators are good at spotting those who want to disagree with everyone, as well as those who are taking on a leadership role or trying to please the moderator and suddenly shifting the group dynamics to disempower those participants so that they don’t taint the actual research. And when literal minded participants are disrupting exercises requiring creativity and imagination,
Professional moderators are skilled at rephrasing questions or exploring thought processes to help those participants be a part of the discussion instead of a barrier to it. Professional focus group moderators have other tricks and tools as well. We often conduct focus groups in pairs so we can isolate insights that are more likely to be common in the population and insights that are more likely to just be from one group. We’re good at coordinating with recruiters to ensure we have the right people participating in the group and that we screen out participants who don’t know enough
or who are fraudulently pretending to be right for a group just so they can get paid to be in it. We’re also good at shutting people down without making them feel awkward and encouraging shy people to talk more often so we hear more balanced information from the group. Beyond that, having a third party who’s not affiliated with your organization helps to keep the process more objective and less influenced by internal narratives. I’ve been a part of many focus group studies where the client organization thought one way going in
and came out with a completely different perspective after hearing from their participants. I’ve also been a part of studies where the findings were not surprising, but they did help to settle some internal debates about customers or consumers. At the end of the day, the question to ask is, can we afford for this focus group to have the potential to fail? And if the answer is no, that’s when it’s time to call in the professionals. I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been the Marketing Gateway. See you next time.
Today’s plug is for soup. And I probably don’t need to sell you on this too much because it’s pretty cold here in St. Louis and soup’s a great thing to have on hand. But did you know soup actually has a bunch of advantages that make it a good thing to have as part of your diet?
One of those advantages is what goes in soups, which is often a lot of vegetables along with any proteins like meat, mushrooms, beans, or tofu. Soup provides a great way for you to ensure you’re eating a balanced diet in one single serving. And because you’re cooking all those things together, you don’t tend to lose the food’s nutritional density the way you might if you cooked things separately. The second is that soup is mostly water, and so it fills you up without adding a bunch of calories to your diet. Now,
Not all soups are created equal, and there definitely are some that are loaded with cheese and cream and pasta and other high calorie ingredients that can make those calories add up quick. And you should definitely skip the bread bowl. But most soups are reasonably low in calories compared to other foods of the same volume, and they help you to feel full without overeating. A third advantage is that soup is relatively cheap to make and creates a bunch of servings.
I usually can get at least a week’s worth of meals out of a single pot of vegetable soup and spend less than $10 on all the ingredients. My wife likes to put pasta or rice into hers and usually spends about the same. You can also freeze soup really easily. Just pour it into a gallon-sized freezer bag, lay it on a flat metal pan, and set it in your freezer for a few hours. It’ll be nice and rectangular when you’re done and easy to stack or slot into a freezer alongside other bags. And finally,
When you’re cold, a nice hot bowl of soup is one of the best ways to warm your body up and keep it warm for a while. This can help you to save on energy bills if you’re working at home, but also make it easier for you to wear fewer heavy layers and feel more comfortable in general. Enduring a cold spell that can make your whole day feel a whole lot warmer.
Leave a Reply