What is a focus group: definition, when it helps and when it does not
A focus group is a conversation led by a moderator with a small group of people who share a defined profile, to understand why they think what they think about a brand, a product or an idea. It does not measure how many people think something: it shows the reasons, the language and the tensions behind a buying decision.
What exactly is a focus group?
It is a qualitative research technique. A moderator leads a conversation with a group of people whose profile matters for the study's question: a brand's customers, people who left it, people about to buy in a category. The conversation follows a discussion guide that sets the topics and the timing, while leaving room for what nobody expected.
The value of a focus group is not each person's opinion on its own, but what happens between them: how they explain a choice, which words they use, where they contradict each other, which argument wins the others over and which objection nobody dares to raise until someone raises it first.
How many people take part, and how long does it last?
At WAV we work with groups of 6 to 8 people and sessions of 90 to 120 minutes. With fewer people the conversation loses contrast; with more, some barely speak and the moderator spends the session handing out turns. A study usually has several groups, one for each segment the decision needs to compare.
| Element | Usual practice at WAV |
|---|---|
| People per group | 6 to 8 |
| Length of each session | 90 to 120 minutes |
| Groups per study | One per segment to compare, for example customers and non-customers apart |
| Venue | A room in Santiago, Chile, with a 360 camera and one microphone per person |
| Recording | Video of the whole room and separate audio for each participant |
Which decisions does a focus group serve?
It serves when the question starts with "why" or "how": why people do not choose us, how a new concept is understood, what makes someone hesitate at a price, which name sounds like what the brand means. Some typical cases:
- Before a launch: understand how a product or a model is received and which objections come up first.
- Before a campaign: check whether a message is understood the way the brand believes, and what it brings to mind.
- To understand people who do not buy: non-customers rarely show up in a company's data, and in a group they explain their reasons in their own words.
- To prepare a survey: find the right categories and language before measuring.
When is a focus group the wrong choice?
A focus group does not replace a survey. If you need to know what share of the market prefers an option, or to estimate sales, you need a large, representative sample: a quantitative study. We explain the difference in qualitative vs quantitative research.
It is also a poor fit when the topic is intimate or sensitive and other people's presence holds participants back, or when the profile is so scarce that you cannot bring six people together in one city. In those cases an in-depth interview usually works better. And if the decision is already made and no answer would change it, the study makes no sense: better to know that before paying for it.
What do you get at the end?
A good focus group ends in findings that answer the study's decision. Each finding should carry at least one literal quote, the profile of the person who said it and the moment in the session when they said it, so anyone can go back to the recording and check. A finding without a quote is the analyst's opinion.
It also has to be read at the right scale. If five of seven people in a group reacted the same way, that shows a direction and a size within the group, not a market share. Presenting it as a statistic is one of the most common mistakes.
How does WAV run a focus group?
We run the full study in Santiago, Chile: design starting from the decision, recruitment, room, moderation, analysis and delivery in Spanish and English. Three practices set it apart:
- Individual before group. Each person writes down their view before discussing it, using the nominal group technique, so the group does not sweep the quieter people along.
- One microphone per person and a 360 camera. With a single room microphone it is very hard to know who said each sentence. In a real focus group we measured that a microphone's wearer was the loudest voice on their own microphone only 11 of 120 seconds (how we measured it).
- Verified quotes. WR3, our software, tells who is speaking with 90.4% agreement with a human review, measured on 141 moments of a real session, and every quote is checked against the recording before it goes into the report.
To see what the result looks like, browse the sample report, built from a fictional study.