In this video, we will talk about focus groups, a very popular method for collecting qualitative information when undertaking marketing research. You will learn what is a focus group and you will be given several tips on how to organize and run one by yourself. Focus groups involve the getting together of a small number of people who under the guidance of a moderator discuss a topic. Due to their dynamic nature, group discussions are especially useful for researching new products, testing new concepts or determining what if situations. Focus groups may take some time to organize however sessions usually last between one to two hours and can provide rich information and in-depth insights on your research topic. Professional research companies use special facilities designed for conducting focus groups where rooms have one way meters through which managers and executives can listen and observe the sessions. You don't really need that if you are to undertake your own research. You can observe focus groups either by running it yourself or by quietly sitting as an observer while one of your employees or co-workers moderates the discussion. Make sure that their room YouTube is both quiet and comfortable for your guests. Focus groups are usually conducted face to face, although you may decide to run a non-line focus group in order to research markets that are online based, geographically dispersed or hard to find. Key aspects for successfully running a focus group session are the participants and the moderator. Participants should be very carefully selected. You want people that have relevant things to say and who are willing to share their views. Depending on your goals, you can research groups of your own customers, your competitors' customers, experts or your employees. A typical focus group may have five to twelve participants. The numbers should be small enough to allow its participant to be actively engaged and large enough to provide a variety of views. For an inexperienced moderator, a small number, for example six participants, might be easier to handle. The moderator is the person that facilitates the group discussion. She or he needs to be able to guide the discussion in such a way to keep the conversation on track and at the same time allow for interesting and unexpected themes to emerge. It also involves being a good listener, being good at follow-up questioning and probing, being sensitive to nonverbal communication and capable of managing groups of people with diverse personalities. You may decide to hire a professional moderator or go on and run a focus group session by yourself. If you are planning to moderate your own focus group, a simple rule you may follow would be to keep an open mind, to try and engage all participants equally and to only participate in the conversation in order to provoke responses or introduce ideas. Also, it would be a good idea to create beforehand a conversation guide with questions or topics to be discussed and activities to be used. This will help you keep track of the conversation as well as ensure that all important themes were covered. You should try and phrase the questions as open-ended as possible. Ask questions about who, why, how, when, where, and what to initiate and stimulate conversation among participants. It is best to start with general questions and then proceed to more specific ones. You can use brainstorming and other creative activities such as drawing to facilitate expression. Projective techniques such as role-playing associations, sentence completion, analogies and metaphors might prove handy. You can use role-play to assign roles and ask questions about your product and promotion strategies. An example question would be, if you were the product manager, what improvements would you make to this product? Another idea would be to divide participants into two groups and ask them for example to perform a debate on whether price is an important factor or not when buying your product. The data you will collect by running a focus script are mostly verbal information and it will be useful to record them either through video or audio so that you can go back and revisit what was said. You will probably need this for the analysis, especially if you are running the session alone. Also, if possible, ask someone else a friend, a coworker or an employee to be present and either moderate the discussion or keep notes throughout the focus group. It is important to write down your observations and a detailed overview of the session as soon as possible. You will then only need to revisit the recorded material in order to look for details or refresh your memory. To analyze your data you should go back to your research goals, pick the relevant bits and pieces from the discussion and organize them in a way that helps you answer your research questions. By listening to the audio recordings and visiting your notes you can identify key issues which can help you draw conclusions. Visual ads such as concept maps, diagrams and flowcharts can help you illustrate relationships between key issues and or themes. Focus groups can generate a wealth of information though not all information might be relevant to your research goals. It is so important to keep reminding yourself of your research aims and to try and filter out only those data that can contribute to the development of marketing inside useful to your business prosperity.