Thursday, August 06, 2009

Is "Focus" Groups misspelled?

focus group n. /fŭkūs/gɹuːp/

1. A way of giving power to people who are highly motivated by: a.) a free lunch, b.) a small fee, or c.) hearing themselves speak.

2. A means of wasting countless design and strategy hours, and negating years of expertise by depending upon the opinion of people who either don't know or don't care.

3. A way of removing or shifting responsibility for the economic success or failure of any product, marketing strategy, or promotional campaign because the "focus group preferred it." See also: scapegoat

4. A highly effective way of killing any type of innovation, intuition, or creativity in a formal, costly setting versus an equally accurate alternative known as the dartboard.

5. A quick means to making a product, strategy or marketing project bland (or in some cases, worse) in order to appease all who attended or participated.

And to quote Steve Jobs (you gonna argue with Apple's business model?!)
“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

Finally, Apple design guru Jonathan Ive says
“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

The definition is from Fast Company

The quotes are from an interview in Fortune Magazine.

No comments: