On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 06:20:14PM +0900, Michael Turner wrote:
<snip>
> In all seriousness: there is an interesting book out recently called
> "The Myth of Excellence," which had its origins in a customer
> survey that came back with all the wrong answers. Try as they
> might, the authors just couldn't get the right answers from these
> people. People just couldn't understand what they *should* want,
> dammit.
>
> Finally, they gave in and started listening. And reinvented the
> obvious: "The customer is always right."
<snip>
Focus groups have their risks. It's easy to exclude some important group of
the population. (Many focus groups exclude people with full-time jobs, for
example, simply because of the scheduling of their meetings.) And there's
nothing fundamentally wrong with a niche product or service. From a
marketing point of view, a problem with focus groups can be that their
members are too informed. Regular consumers don't tend to spend that much
time thinking or talking about their purchases (though that depends on what
the purchase is).
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Received on Fri Oct 12 20:08:47 2001