PFA Research

There may be times when you need detailed insight into issues of concern or perhaps to test the potential of a new product prior to investing.  Sometimes this can be achieved using face-to-face or telephone qualitative interviews.  However, often there is value in stimulating customers to discuss the issues in an open forum.

Focus groups provide your organisation with the perfect opportunity to allow group members to openly debate the issues, to freely express their ideas, beliefs, emotions or concerns and to make suggestions on how best to proceed.

Focus groups usually consist of 8 – 12 members who are selected to meet set criteria. These criteria can be based on factors such as product usage or those sharing similar characteristics, e.g. place of residence, occupation, age or gender.

There are many reasons why organisations, both commercial and public sector, ask us to conduct focus groups, such as generating new ideas, assessing customer feedback, evaluating new products and informing marketing strategies.

Using a focus group will help you to understand why your customers feel as they do, opens up the possibility of identifying different viewpoints and helps identify those aspects of your product which are most important to your customers. Focus groups also enable the participants to challenge each others comments, thereby providing a more realistic insight to what your customer really thinks.

There are many scenarios where focus groups will be an effective solution to meet the needs of your organisation. Focus groups can be used as a standalone technique or as a complementary technique in a multi-method approach.

Focus groups can be particularly useful prior to undertaking a major survey as they offer the means for identifying the key issues for subsequent quantification. Focus groups can also be used to probe the outcomes of a survey in greater depth.

PFA Research can arrange all aspects of the focus group, from designing the topic schedule, recruiting focus group members and moderating the focus group through to the analysis of the responses. Our expertise will enable us to obtain the essential market intelligence necessary to meet the specific needs of your organisation.