Following Seth’s “But the focus group loved it”,
I tried to map what focus groups do and don’t, based on my experience. My overall conclusion is that the most common mistake with focus groups is to try and use them as a predictive tool.

Focus groups can help you…

• Map various attitudes towards existing products, brands and concepts – things that have been out in the market for a while.
• Limited understanding of usage patterns (not for interactive products – usability & experience labs do that much better).
• Support the interpretation of quantitative research results.
• Locate problems and gaps in existing experience.
• Create additional hypotheses to your own to check with further research (that’s the only bit that is slightly predictive).
• Support mapping of worldviews and cultural themes connected to the issue as part of the general research

However:

• Never use them to judge or justify innovation, most participants are immediately conservative in group context , especially if you’re aiming to address/create a new want.
• Be very cautious when dealing with arenas where there is peer pressure for conformity on emotions and worldviews (and which arenas aren’t?).
• Don’t use for arenas where the psycho-social situation is too complex. Don’t expect them to give you deep or specific understanding of emotions and social situations.
• Don’t use them for highly individualistic arenas – ones where personal taste, attitude, worldview etc vary greatly.
• Never ever ever use them to judge creative concepts & work .

Overall, my experience taught me that you get better results from ethnographic research and from personal interviews for most of the goals focus groups are usually chosen for.

Over the years, many many times clients have asked me to check if a concept is “right” using focus groups. My answer is: “Yes, as long as we’re talking on the old, existing, concept.”

[I was happy to discover this post has been qouted in Fortune’s “Business Innovation Insider”]

Update: No.  Calling focus groups “Consumer Panels” does not change anything.
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In his excellent “Metacool” blog Diego Rodriguez writes:

“If you’re only designing the object and not paying attention to the story surrounding it, you’re abdicating your opportunity to craft something that’s truly infectious.”

Design is mostly communicated in space, stories are communicated (told) in time. This is why design has traditioanlly been biased towards communicating with signs and not stories. However, what are stories made of if not signs composed into a narrative?
(yup, this is the old paradigm/syntagm difference)

There is a gap in traditional marketing communications, an unecesary dichotomy between sign-led design and narrative-led advertisement. Recently, these walls are coming down and “narrative marketing” is a much discussed concept.
However, the most succefull exmaples around us (ICQ and iPod to names just two) show that impact is greater when your design tells compelling stories, while your stories have an overarching design that creates a rich, consistent & economic sign system.

You need both true meaning and a well made structure behind the work. Otherwise – it’s not well made marketing (or branding), it’s either making things pretty or ill articualted concepts.

Form & Meaning – that’s the way poetry works, that’s the way science works, and that’s what marketing should aspire to.
Oh, and it’s practical as well – it’s the best way to communicate, as we’re all such sophisticated and rlentless pattern recognition and meaning inference machines.

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Coming across some really bad advertising and branding lately, from some of the world’s leading agencies, I realised the following:

Every creative agency evolves to the point where it has the highest chance to have bad ideas approved by clients and implemented.

How?

• Every creative process involves the creation of some bad ideas along good ones.
• Creatives are often not objective about their own ideas, and will occasionally try to pitch them to clients.
• You’d think that the better an agency’s reputation is, the more clients expect, but the reality is that this reputation will have a certain voodoo affect, intimidating clients into believing that maybe not getting the agency’s ideas is their own fault (emperor’s new cloths).
• The fact that successful agencies tend to become better and better presenters and sellers of ideas as they evolve also helps.
• The amount/rate of bad ideas succeeding in traveling outside of the agency may decrease with experience, but then ego, which grows with reputation, kicks in and “mitigates” criticism.
• So a top-5 agency, has a better chances of selling a bad idea to it’s client than anybody else. QED
  
  Wikipedia: “The Peter Principle is a theory originated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter. It states that successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not
  competent.”

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