Focus Group

A focus group is a group of people who are assembled to participate in a discussion about a product before it's launch. They will help provide feedback about the campaign.  The purpose of the focus group for us was to find out if the products fit with one another and if our aims and intentions of our products were conveyed. It is to trial the products on people who have never seen them before and find out what their initial reaction is. It gives us an idea on whether they are likely to be successful or not and how we could develop the products further if it is necessary. The likely things to come out of a focus group are observations that we may have been unaware of before about how the products are interpreted by an audience and any suggestions that might help further propel our products in to potential success.

My group and I prepared for the focus group by ultimately printing out the digipack a few times and sticking it together so we would have a few hard copies to present to the group. Additionally we also made sure the video was finished and flowed well from start to end so that the focus group would consume the intentions of the video. Moreover we also made sure the website was complete and working so we were able to show a demo to the group and give them the opportunity to have a go themselves and for them to experiment with the accessibility of the website. Finally we made sure that we had prepared some open ended questions so that the group would be able to answer in full rather than a closed questions which would only produce a yes or no answer- unhelpful.

Unfortunately myself and Ben were unable to attend the focus group due to other commitments so our other team member, Ksenia, ran the focus group. She asked questions such as 'What do you think of all three products?' and 'What kind of band do you think they are?'. These open ended questions led to productive answers which gave us feedback that was proven useful. This is shown in the voice recording. Also we made sure that we stated very clearly that we would rather have truthful responses rather than them just telling us what they thought we wanted to hear.

We recorded our focus group using a voice recorder. This was because many people feel a lot more uncomfortable with camera pointing in their face and therefore tend to watch what they say. Whereas with a voice recording it is much more subtle and the focus group will likely forget that they are being recorded and will give relevant answers that they mean. The most significant findings from the focus group are listed below:

Digipack 

-on the right side- cant see the words (disk side)

-country music?

-looks quite indie or electronic (MGMT)

-folk

-really like the colours but quite hard to read the font (inside and outside) needs to be larger

-band name needs to be slightly bigger 

-like natural colors 

-lacks intensity

-feels like an acoustic band

-purple may be a little intense

-liked the picture with them eyes closed

-or the one in the studio

-texture makes it country

Website

-very indie

-very nice contrast

-the menu - annoying and confusing -write the whole name

-t-shirt cant really see

-needs to be a little more intense 

-maybe more photos?

-too simplistic maybe?

-put the button to change pictures

Video

-face fits with the voice

-9/10 people think that video fits with the website

After a positive focus group, we have decided to mainly improve the website and work on the things that they thought may have poor accessibility. We decided to make the font bigger, added more pictures and also added more items to the SET store. We also tried looking at removing the purple from the digipack and making it more blue, however we all came to the conclusion that we didn't like how this looked and decided to revert it back to how it was due to the fact we had other comments saying it looked more indie and the fact that the purple matched another song on the track list such as 'Winter Jackets'.