Yes, that’s a clickbait title.
It’s also a very common and genuine sentiment. If you run a quick search on Twitter for “better than focus groups,” you can see that they take a lot of heat for not being the best methodology available to researchers.
But why should focus groups be the best methodology?
Indeed, why should any methodology be the best methodology?

When planning a research study, it’s impossible to know what the “best,” or most appropriate methodology will be until you have thoroughly outlined the research objective, desired outcomes, and intended action plan.
If your goal is to make predictions that will generalize to a defined population of people, then you’ll need a methodology that supports random sampling and large sample sizes. If your goal is to understand how certain products and packages are improperly used, you’ll need a methodology that allows you to observe people, whether that’s in their homes, workplaces, or a research facility, as they try to use a product.
Declaring an eternally winning methodology is simply unscientific. It’s also lazy. It gives the researcher permission to turn off their analytical brain and use whatever methodology they are most familiar with. It’s equivalent to banging in a screw with a hammer.

This ongoing desire to claim one methodology as the best isn’t helpful. But what is helpful is to have a wide range of tools, each one uniquely suited to solve a certain set of problems. That’s how, today, biometrics will be the winner but, tomorrow, they’ll be the loser when a focus group is by far the right tool for the job.
If you’re ready to hammer out a research problem, please get in touch with us!
You might like to read these:
- What if everything you’re doing to design a marketing research study is wrong?
- Is consumer recall of past purchases and behaviours fact or fake news?
- Conducting research is easy… if you understand hundreds of cognitive biases!

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