What Is A Focus Group?

What Is A Focus Group?

In this post I will be writing about what a focus group is and why we use it.

A focus group is simply a set of people that evaluate and give feedback for your product in order to improve it so more people will purchase it. The focus group will allow us to identify what will work and what won't within the whole music campaign (digipak, website and music video). This is the most ideal time to create a focus group because it allows us to make either minor or big changes to it before it actually releases. This will increase the potential to make more people be interested and listen to our product. As well as this, as the focus group doesn't know anything about the product including the genre, it will allow us to see if the genre is obvious to them or not. This will end with that the whole campaign will be at its best standard possible. As I stated before the focus group are first time viewers which will show us first time impressions of the whole product and get honest opinions even if they are negative. Negative opinions are very important in some cases because it will also open our eyes into creating a campaign that is much better for our primary audience which we possible never realised about. 

Firstly, to demonstrate our digipak we will prepare several open and closed questions which will get our focus group thinking deeply into it in order to give us useful feedback. We will also print out several copies of the digipak so that the group can see the digipak panels up close as if it were the actual product. The digipak will also be shown on the board so they can see it in a bigger format. Secondly, to demonstrate the website we will prepare quantitative and qualitative questions to get them thinking after having seen the digipak. The website will be shown on the board whilst we guide them through it. Whilst we show them the website we will also ask them questions that ask if the digipak and website both link well together. As they will have a printed copy of the digipak this will make it easier for them to identify if they are similar or not. Lastly, we would show a rough cut of the music video in order for them to tell us if they whole campaign links in well together, however, not obvious as they aren't supposed to look exactly the same. Overall, our group wants to find out the honest opinions the focus group has to say and make changes by listening to it. It helps because the set of people are also close to the primary audience we want to sell to, therefor, this will give us an idea on what their style is like.

You start with the digipak and website first because if we would show the rough cut of the music video first thing the focus group might already have a set opinion on it and will relate the music video to all platforms which isn't our goal as they aren't supposed to fully link. This is because the campaign is for a full album and not a single song, each song will have a distinct style to it. Mainly, we don't want the group to know what genre it is at the beginning because the digipak and website should clearly demonstrate that. If they don't know the genre that is when it will allow us to make changes and perfect it. When we present to the focus group we should definitely not reveal the genre or ideologies of the artist as it is supposed to be clear in the products. 

I think that the most effective way of recording what the focus group says is by recording the session on a voice memo and to also take notes of it. This is most effective because after the meeting we have we can listen back to the recording and clearly understand what each individual said. Also, by writing down notes it will help us remember the key points that we should consider when making changes to the campaign. 

Overall, the focus group will help us a lot when it comes to gathering an audience and making sure people will purchase the product. All we have to do as a group to make sure we are fully prepare is have a variety of questions, print out the digipak and have the campaign fully ready to present to them.