Market Research: Online Qual vs. Traditional Focus Groups (Video)

Most of us have come from the traditional face-to-face focus group world. Obviously online is a technology-driven method, and it has some serious advantages over face-to-face qual in my opinion. Now there are times when face-to-face totally makes sense. It also works great in combination with online qual where either before or after you do focus groups, you can do the online qual piece. But the nice thing about it is you’ve got the ability here to dive deeper. You’ve got multiple days to spend with these people. Now, you’re in a regular focus group – let’s say you’re in a focus group, you may be 90-120 minutes, you’ve got eight people in that room, everyone’s truly going to have the ability to give you maybe 15 minutes of live commentary. And some of that might even be a little biased just by group dynamics, etc. And again, great place, time and place for face-to-face live focus groups. However, when you go online you’ve got this one-on-one connection and the ability to do social activities that get people to interact over longer periods of time. So, for instance, four-day study, you may have two hours of connection with each respondent in that study. Versus the 15 minutes you may get of output in a standard kind of face-to-face focus group. There’s a lot more data there, a lot more ability to do different things. You can’t have them do collages or storytelling necessarily, in the middle of a focus group. But you can do that in an online qual study.

Another great advantage of online qual is that you don’t have to travel to see the action. You can watch real time on your computer, laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone. and you can be in any market in the world simultaneously. So, you can be in Europe, the US, and Asia all at once, concurrently running a study. So the ability to see these things, from the convenience of wherever you are, without having to go around the world to watch the action, not only is a great convenience for you, it saves money for the company, and just puts all that information right at your fingertips, again in your own world.