Quotes & Sayings About Focus Groups

When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them? — Dick Wolf

Focus group research has created a composite No-Man who resembles no-one anyone has ever met. — Cathy Lewis

Adam Gottbetter defines focus groups as being a form of group interview where is capitalized the communication between research participants. This is conducted in order to generate data. Although group interviews are often used simply as a quick and convenient way to collect data from several people simultaneously, Adam Gottbetter explains why focus groups explicitly use group interaction as part of the method. According to Adam Gottbetter this means that instead of the researcher asking each person to respond to a question in turn, people are encouraged to talk to one another. This talk consists of asking questions, exchanging anecdotes and commenting on each other's experiences and points of view. — Adam Gottbetter

To me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups. — George Carlin

Noble again chose Larry McCarthy, the veteran media consultant who was known for his ability to distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol. McCarthy had a reputation for being a particularly shrewd consumer of O, or opposition research on the rival candidates he was targeting. He often honed his ads using polls, focus groups, micro-targeting data, and "perception analyzers" - meters that evaluated viewers' split-second reactions to demo tapes. McCarthy — Jane Mayer

Through "deprogramming" or cult intervention the only issues that are addressed focus upon the specific group and group involvement. The subject of such an intervention subsequently may leave the group and go on with their life reassuming their own basic individual values and beliefs. — Rick Ross

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

First a small team writes a small system. Then they find the natural fracture lines and divide the system into relatively independent parts for expansion. The architects help choose the most appropriate fracture lines and then follow the system as a whole, keeping the big picture in mind as the groups focus on their smaller section. — Kent Beck

Adam Gottbetter goes beyond the original usage of focus groups when they are used within communication studies to explore the effects of films and television programs. — Adam Gottbetter

Write your script. When you see things you don't want, don't think about them, write about them, talk about them, push against them, or join groups that focus on the don't wants ... remove your attention from don't wants.. and place them on do wants. — Rhonda Byrne

I have always done what I love myself. My philosophy was that I never had focus groups. I did what I wear. — Ralph Lauren

Chris Argyris criticized "good communication that blocks learning," arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because "they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability. — Peter M. Senge

Focus groups are a waste of time, filled with people telling you what you want to hear so they can go home. — Sergio Zyman

Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old. You see, from the honky tonks you got such a mixture of all different types of music, and I think what happened is that when Elvis busted through, it enabled all these other groups that had been going along more or less the same avenue - I'm sure there were hundreds of them - to tighten up and focus on what was going to be popular. If they had a steel guitar they dropped it. The weepers and slow country ballads pretty much went out of their repertoire. And what you had left was country-orientated boogie music. — Peter Guralnick

Many of the people I've worked with in family groups have been that obsessed with people they care about. When I asked them what they were feeling, they told me what the other person was feeling. When I asked what they did, they told me what the other person had done. Their entire focus was on someone or something other than themselves. Some of them had spent years of their lives doing this - worrying about, reacting to, and trying to control other human beings. They were shells, sometimes almost invisible shells, of people. Their energy was depleted - directed at someone else. They couldn't tell me what they were feeling and thinking because they didn't know. Their focus was not on themselves. — Melody Beattie

It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful. — Sam Altman

What's the job of the candidate in this world? The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous. — Newt Gingrich

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts. — N. T. Wright

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working. — Christopher McQuarrie

The most powerful people on earth are focus groups. — William J. Clinton

Today's dissenters mainly focus their attention and expend their energies on the most inconsequential of trivia ... Allegedly serious intellectuals quibble endlessly over such ridiculous trivialities ... In the meantime, the public is lulled into a perilous somnolence, spoon-fed pap, and palpable untruths, many of which are turned out by special-interest and pressure groups and well organized propaganda machines. — J. Paul Getty

You write things that are of interest to you. There's no focus group. — Zach Galifianakis

This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. — Walter Isaacson

With the initial focus groups and the initial look-sees, the Rams are a very popular team in Southern California. And so one of the reasons that it was attractive to us to work against them is because they have that good flavor. — Jerry Jones

In the black sororities, they celebrate achievement academically, and they really do work toward community service. As much as the white sororities claim that's the case in their groups, it's not really so. White sororities focus on relationships. — Alexandra Robbins

The British press ... [claimed that Tony] Blair was simply Bush's poodle - a favorite phrase, bewilderingly popular, although it made no sense - and that he was ignoring the will of the British people. Considering the hacks had spent Blair's first six years in office condemning him for relying on focus groups and opinion polls for his policies - in other words, paying attention to nothing but the will of the people, or at least their whims - that seemed a little rich to me, but as I said, logical consistency has never figured highly in the British media's scale of values. — Larry King

If you ever go behind the glass and look at the focus groups that are deciding what you're gonna watch, it's scary. This cross-section of people they just happen to bring in to decide the fate of mankind on television is really scary. — Adrian Pasdar

I think that the best approach would be if the American people ever insist that we cut down on the massive amounts of money that moves into the campaigns from special interest groups, and if we resist publicly by saying "No more negative advertisements that destroy the reputations of one's opponents." In the meantime, just don't pay any attention to negative ads, if you can avoid them, and try to focus on the issues. — Jimmy Carter

This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion. — Stephen Harper

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design. — Jonathan Ive

the inventors and company executives don't generally partake in their own creations. Thus the heavy reliance on focus groups with the targeted consumer. — Michael Moss

Big-time directors and the studios that bankroll them prefer to dwell in the comfortable, familiar center, where mammon is God and the only divine word comes from focus groups. — Richard Corliss

We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of. — Ricky Gervais

Most people who are on the inside of a technology have no idea what it's like to look at from an end user's point of view. This is why they have focus groups. I'm really familiar with this because I worked 10 years for Hallmark Cards in the U.S. — Pat Cadigan

About 85 percent of what you see is just because I get on the phone and [say], 'Let's go do this'. I don't do any market research or test groups or focus [groups]. I just go, 'It's my company; would I buy it, personally?' — Todd McFarlane

If Nintendo had been an American company playing by the rules such companies follow, it would have given up long before there was any indication of success - that is, after Arakawa's original market surveys, when the AVS failed, or when there was resistance at the first trade shows. Many American companies are so wedded to market research that the devastating results of focus groups have signaled death knells. Had Nintendo been American, the company would probably have retreated when retailers in New York declined to place orders, or when it took more than a year for big sales numbers to appear. But commitment to an idea and pure tenacity are inherent in Japanese business philosophy - and certainly to Japanese business successes. — David Sheff

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do. — Sydney Pollack

the early 1980s, the A&W fast-food restaurant chain introduced a burger with a third of a pound of beef to compete with McDonald's popular quarter pounder. Although most customers preferred A&W's new burger in taste tests, it was a big disappointment in the marketplace. When focus groups were run to get to the bottom of this paradox, A&W discovered that many customers thought a burger with one-third of a pound of beef was less generous than one with one-quarter of a pound. Customers were attending to the denominator, just not very intelligently: The smaller "3" led many to conclude that one-third is smaller than one-quarter!21 — Thomas Gilovich

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third. — K. Eric Drexler

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet. — Joe Eszterhas

Grassroots groups challenge the "business-as-usual" environmentalism that is generally practiced by the more privileged wildlife-and conservation-oriented groups. The focus of activists of color and their constituents reflects their life experiences of social, economic, and political disenfranchisement. — Robert D Bullard

When we started NFL Films, there were no focus groups, there were no demographic studies, there were no surveys. Every decision that we made, we made with our hearts, not with our heads. And, in the very beginning, we really didn't even have a business plan. — Steve Sabol

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback. — Charles Kennedy

Asian Americans, like Native Americans, are not evenly distributed across the United
States. To lump these people together ignores the sharp differences between them. Any
examination of Asian Americans quickly reveals their diversity, which will be apparent as
we focus on individual Asian American groups, beginning with Asian Indians. — Richard T. Schaefer

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message. — Jane Mayer

Peter Hart, who's a pollster that's - who's done many focus groups about Hillary Clinton, talks about a glass curtain. She talks about the glass ceiling. He says voters feel there's a glass curtain between themselves and Hillary Clinton. They can't relate to her. They feel they don't really understand her, and that's made it easier for her opponents, of which there have been many over many years, to define her the way they want to. — Tamara Keith

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. — Steven Pinker

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders. — Noam Chomsky

I was the person, I think, who first said the evening of September 11 that we shouldn't hold this against the Arab community, the Muslim community. We should focus on the individuals and that groups that were involved and not participate in group blame. — Rudy Giuliani

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own. — Daniel Goleman

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158 — Mike Lofgren

It is six months before the election, and the Republicans have already done their focus groups. How do I know? I can hear it in their "message," which they repeat over and over again like a mantra: "Bernie Sanders is ineffective. Bernie Sanders is out of touch. Bernie Sanders is a left-wing extremist. Bernie Sanders rants and raves on the House floor and still no one listens to him. Susan Sweetser, on the other hand, is a sensible moderate who can work with everyone." They think that's how they can beat me. Maybe. — Bernie Sanders

Don't underestimate the value people place on authenticity. Politicians listen to the focus groups and say the things they think people want to hear. But after 30 years of reading consumers, I know that they can smell phonies. — Rochelle B Lazarus

What we are determined to do is to take more people from Syria and that war-torn part of the world as a response to this particular crisis, but again I stress we are taking people from camps because the last thing we want to do is to encourage and reward people smuggling.We are taking people from camps and we are taking family groups; our focus will be on family groups, from persecuted minorities. — Tony Abbott

Because of the spin-meisters and the focus groups and the way politics is run now. It's run by polls and focus groups. So it's even more true today, I think, than it was some 40 years ago. — Bob Newhart

What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this extreme selectivity had transformed the governing of the country, for most of its citizens, into a series of signals meant for someone else. — Joan Didion

For about ten years now, the struggle for democracy and the respect of human rights has been in the focus point - if not a commodity - of political groups aiming to rise to power. — Omar Bongo

In life, you know, they do this in focus groups; if you were in such and such circumstance, what would you do? Well, you never know what you're going do unless you're faced with it. — Viola Davis

As any organizer of focus groups will tell you, people's views on highly emotional subjects, from immigration to abortion to drugs, will change just 30 minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of differing views, provided that they are all given the same information and ground rules that enforce civility. One of the problems of pluralism, then, is the assumption that interests are fixed and that the role of the legislator is simply to act as a transmission belt for them, rather than having his own views that can be shaped by deliberation. — Anonymous

I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job. — Roger Ailes

This deep insecurity has been going on for a while. I mean I picked it up in 2014 sitting in focus groups of women who were feeling terrified, not just about that ISIS was coming, but terrified that their children couldn't be safe at school, terrified about what was happening in Ferguson and other places. — Chuck Todd

I tend to focus on young people and on giving a voice to groups of people who don't normally get their voices heard. — Alexandra Robbins

They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug. And they know who I am, and I believe they're comfortable with the fact that they know I'm not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups. — George W. Bush

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side. — George Gilder

When you make comedy, you make it for the people and you try to have as many screenings and as many tests and you do focus groups and you read the cards and you try to give the people what they want in this comedy. — Chris Rock

Those institutes can develop research-based teaching initiatives in which they work with colleagues across the university to tackle problems. They might focus on why certain groups of students (defined by whatever demography) do not achieve the kind of learning expected, or about how to help all students achieve a new level of development. The initiative would refine the questions; explore the existing literature; and fashion a hypothesis about what might work, a program to implement that hypothesis, and a systematic assessment of the result, ultimately contributing to a growing body of literature on university learning. — Ken Bain