Here Rests The Focus Group (1944 - 2005)

BusinessWeek is heralding the death of the focus group, which were first were used by marketers to gauge consumer sentiment starting in the 1940s, this article says.

“Exasperation with focus groups, while not universal, is growing as companies look for better ways to get inside consumers' heads, often assisted by new technology and the Internet. The dissatisfaction and the proliferation of new research approaches has been escalating so rapidly that the ad industry's main trade group has been spurred to conduct the first widespread study of testing methods since the 1950s.”

While the story mentions different approaches marketers are taking - including holding IM chats with customers - shockingly it ignores monitoring blogs and other consumer channels.

Blog mining serves nicely as an efficient way to open a window onto the minds of consumers. This is because a) bloggers express themselves more freely than consumers who know they are being watched like guinea pigs and b) they tend to represent the influencers - the ones who tell the other five non-bloggers what to buy.

Pete Blackshaw, how could they not include you and Intelliseek in this story? They need your wisdom.

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