4 Elements That Can Lead to a Focus Group Flop
We spend a lot of time working up our cases. We spend a lot of hours on discovery and go into deposition testimony to form that strategy, that we can test with focus groups. But if we get unreliable feedback, then it’s just a waste of our energy, time, and resources.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about the four factors that can cause unreliable feedback from focus groups, and what you should do to avoid them. The ultimate goal is to always have quality feedback so we can rely on it, use it, put it into our cases, format it, and make our cases better.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Why you need to avoid repeat participants
- Revealing your back office
- Planting things that hold the presentation down
- Delivering information in a way that allows them to process it
- Using visual aids in your presentation to keep the people engaged
- Being careful with slanted questions
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Welcome, welcome to the trial lawyer podcast. I’m excited to have you here. I am your host, Elizabeth, and this is a podcast dedicated to folks who are preparing cases, trial lawyers, personal injury, employment, folks running focus groups for that crowd.
Bye. Bye. You Today we’re going to talk [00:01:00] about focus groups and talk about four very sneaky things, four factors that can cause your focus groups to flop. What a flop means to me is when you don’t get reliable feedback. We spend a lot of time working up our cases. We do a lot of discovery, a lot of hours and effort go into deposition testimony to form That strategy and then you can test it with focus groups, but if you walk into a few of these traps, many of these are easy to fall into.
This is not something that it may sound obvious. And some of these kind of have a sneaky hook to them as well. So we’ll talk about each of those. But if we have unreliable feedback, we’ve really wasted our energy, our time, which is most precious, and also resources, and we don’t really want to do that. So these are four things I just wanted to put out there.
You probably have heard these before. Or if you have, just. [00:02:00] Take this as a gentle reminder that to you and your team, folks who are helping you put in together focus groups to try to avoid these things. Our goal is to always have quality feedback so that we can rely on it, use it, put it into our cases, format it, and make our cases better, make us better.
A lot of what we do with focus groups is going to be building our confidence as well. We’ll talk a little bit about that this year and a few other things that I just want to help prepare y’all better. So let’s jump into this episode. All right. So the way I’ve divided these up is there’s four of them.
The top two are really going to be things like, Like thinking set up wise and the bottom two that we’re going to talk about are more about moderating and presenting our first one. And I totally fall into this is repeat participants. We have got to avoid having repeat participants. And also in this bucket comes in our focus group for lifers who basically all they do is.[00:03:00]
Focus groups and that that particular aspect is kind of hard to screen for, but it is pretty easy to screen for repeats and to keep them out. I know that this is a difficult task and a high bar to set because. As most of you probably run into if you’re running focus groups, or if you’re thinking about running about focus groups, just what I’m hearing along with grapevine is it’s harder to get people, people are going back to work or people find new ways to work.
And so fitting in a focus group, wanting to join that it’s not as appealing as it was, especially virtually. And definitely in person. I’ve run a few of those in persons this year and found that we are not going to have our 2019 participant pay. We really are going to have to up the ante again to get quality folks, folks that would show up to jury service and not repeats.
So again, [00:04:00] why would repeats be bad? Well, one, they know a little bit about you. And if they’ve been through one of your focus groups before, they probably know what to expect in the sense of you’re going to be talking all about employment cases or all about business cases or all about personal injury cases.
So their mindset’s kind of already there. They’re not going to be really surprised. I’ve had, again, I’ve fallen for this where it’s just like, Hey, it’s last minute. I’ve got to fill a seat. And I’ve had repeat participants either do a 180. Like they come in one folks group and they have this set of beliefs and this attitude about everything.
And then they come back and they flip and it’s completely opposite. And that’s when obviously you get the eye opening, I won’t, I can’t rely on that person because I feel like they’re flip flopping just to either, because maybe they didn’t like something or something else triggered them. And so it just really causes problems when you got repeats, try to avoid [00:05:00] as best as you can.
And how do we do that? That’d be just screening. You got to just kick those people down the road. Say, thanks so much. We can’t have any repeats. Here’s some other places to do focus groups and then keep screening. One of the things that I’ve done is just add an extra day for recruiting just to give one more day for those advertisements, those emails to get people to come back.
Now, I do believe that you can ask people back after a year, two years, three years, four years, basically a lot of the in person focus group people four years have gone by. I think that’s probably a safe bet, but you’re still going to run into the same problems of, again, these people have seen, they’ve heard, they’ve probably already got their mindset already made it before they come in because they’ve had an experience with you.
They’re just going to either repeat that or like, cause it may be flip flop it altogether. I did have, just as far as an example, I had a fairly reliable retired gentleman who would fill in and [00:06:00] again. Would try not to have them, obviously they can’t come back to the same case, can’t come back to listen to the same set of problems, the same lawyers.
And so I brought him back into a different focus group. His last minute he was available and they’re probably six months in between and it was not good. He was not reliable. He had, like I said, completely switched his attitude on several things and was very combative with everybody else, which I don’t know if I could have predicted that before.
He’s not really an issue that way, but. Either way, if the lawyers ask, or if you’re thinking to yourself, like, wow, I could avoid this, you know, something I repeat in here. So avoid repeat participants and try to avoid those focus group jobbers as I call them, because they’re going to come in there and they’re going to rule the roost.
When you have people who do focus groups often and frequently, they don’t follow the rules, meaning they’re not going to listen to you. They’re going to ask questions. They’re going to interrupt. [00:07:00] A lot of times I find when people have done focus groups a lot, they basically will reveal the magic to everybody else.
Like, Oh, I know what you’re doing now. Oh, I see. You want us to do blah, blah. And they’ll make a lot of assumptions out loud. Well, now we’re tainting everybody else. If we were trying to withhold or keep that feedback in a box until we were ready to let it out there. So they just cause disruption problems I’ve found, and it just doesn’t help.
And repeat people do the same thing too. So. Because they’ll say, Oh, this is what we did last time. Or, Oh, you want mess to do blah, blah. Oh, well, you’re saying that so that they can reveal the magic and the mystery. And sometimes you don’t want those mysteries ever revealed because then it reveals your bias.
So let’s move on to tip number two, which would be revealing your bias. And this again can be one of those It happens subconsciously sometimes. We just, we are really trying hard not to reveal where our position is and [00:08:00] it just naturally comes out. In this next presentation you’re going to see my case.
You just let the cat out of the bag. But I’ve also had people who just come right out of into a presentation say, well, I just want, you know, this is my case. This is my, so you’re automatically revealing your bias. When you do that as people who are listening to you, you basically kind of have a choice.
You’re going to try to please this person and go along with everything that they say, whether you agree or not, or you may be very opposing to it. But either way, you know, that you were like, It’s now slanted at a tilt with your bias revealed, they may not be as honest with you. They don’t want to hurt your feelings.
And so that’s why we always try to frame everything with this is not, we are not involved. We are here to present, to ask questions and to gather your feedback. We don’t have a dog in the fight. Because we don’t want them because again, they’ll either withhold information or they’ll try to be nice [00:09:00] about it.
Or you want to get that quality feedback. That’s what all these factors are about getting that quality feedback. And that’s one where you’re standing right in front of them. You’re asking for their feedback and they’re, it’s like jury selection, right? They know you’re involved somehow and they could obviously hold back.
And that’s not what we want to focus group. We really want their feedback. It’s really hard. Sometimes, like I said, it subconsciously flips out. So, how can we correct this? And that would be just looking really closely at our presentation and how we word it. And then try to avoid putting ourselves in that position where we’re thinking, Well, my client, oh, shoot, I just said it.
Or, she’s told me, like, oh, now we’ve. So that’s why we work really hard with our presentations and write them out going off the cuff. Inevitably, we’ll have this information just flop out of your mouth because subconsciously it is, it’s hard to, it’s hard to keep that back. So we work really hard to make sure we stay neutral in our [00:10:00] presentations, how we say things, how we write things, our questions, and we’ll talk about that in a second.
Oh, just really wanting that quality feedback. And again, if they. Know that you’re slanted. You’re going to get slanted on. You’re going to get slanted information on the way back out. So those are two kind of set up factors that can really cause the apple cart to topple over and not get good feedback.
The next two are really about the moderating or presenting. And that first one is having a presentation that doesn’t include any visual aid, even if you’re just sharing screen, or you’ve got a PowerPoint that’s got like a word or two words or whatever. Okay. One picture or just the Google street view of what the intersection look like people’s attention spans are just so tiny, you know, used to say is goldfish right?
Well, we’re worse than goldfish now with all of our technology and how we take in information. [00:11:00] So. If the brain is bored, not stimulated, like we’re going somewhere else and our brains and we’re looking at our phones or doing looking around that other stuff, if you’re virtual and even in person, this totally happens.
You can see people completely check out. I mean, it’s not difficult to see. And I do this all the time. Someone’s given a presentation and it just goes like purely, here’s just information, A, B, C, and that’s all I’m getting from them. I just kind of glaze over, I can check out. This happens all the time with any kind of presentation, but especially with those focus group people, we need to make sure that we are keeping them engaged and also delivering the information in a way that allows them to process it.
If you’re sitting and you don’t know what you’re about to hear, other than you’re going to listen to some stuff and, and sort of give some feedback and you’re having then to take in verbal information and organize it and it’s, [00:12:00] maybe it’s a chronology, it’s a story, it’s all these things, they’re just going to kind of get a little lost and throw their hands up.
And that’s what you, that’s, That’s the experience you’ll have is you’ll either have, I just need more information. Well, I need to have this thing. And it’s, you’ve already given them so much information. They really need more or they get a lot of confusion going on. Like they need you to repeat a lot of things or go back to that.
Or did you hear that? So a lot of recombing back through the presentation because they couldn’t keep up with all of the information just given to them verbally. Okay. And one of the things we’re going to talk about a lot in the podcast coming up, and one of the reasons I’ll probably put some of our podcast episodes on YouTube, is to be able to show you the visual aid that we are talking about creating or using.
So you can take it and use it as well and get the information out there quicker. They’re going to learn it faster and they’re going to be able to see it. Simulate it quicker so then you can turn around and get that feedback [00:13:00] quickly. And that’s always super helpful. So we want to always have some kind of visual aid in our presentation and in our PowerPoint.
Even if you’re virtual or in person, same thing. We believe, uh, we believe we’re very engaging in person. That’s true to an extent, but you know, with focus groups, we’re giving them a ton of information and hoping that we get feedback and if it’s just all verbal, a lot of it’s just going to go by the wayside.
So we want to avoid that again. Getting that quality, reliable feedback. And my last one for this episode will be slanted questions. And again, this is such a sneaky thing that happens to us. We really, I think it’s a subconscious. We’re not trying to be sneaky. We’re not trying to slant things, but it’s just a.
It’s a language communication thing. And it’s also knowing that the people on the other side are completely suspicious of us. So every word, if it doesn’t pass the, you know, the gut check, they’re like trying to figure out, well, where’s [00:14:00] this going? Or who is this person? What is this about? And what I mean by slanting questions is a lot of times we want to ask questions.
Well, if I just told you X, would it change your mind? Well, they’re gonna assume one that you have X. Then we’ve got all kinds of suspicion problems. The easier way to answer the question is just make it much more broad, and then you can list off different factors. But we always want to make sure the best way to cure slanted questions is to go with open ended questions.
Steering them in a way or offering multiple available options. And I don’t mean by saying, well if you had X, Y, Z, would that change your mind? See, we’re assuming it would change their mind. So a lot of our questions kind of have assumptions. What questions do you have? I just assumed you had questions, right?
They may not have any at all. So one quick trick that I learned during my time with the Keenan law firm was. Always adding, if any, do you have any concerns? If any, [00:15:00] uh, do you have any questions? If any, we’re just opening it right back up instead of making that assumption that they do have a concern or assumption that they do have a question.
Just opening it back up to, if any, right back to that big open ended question. With those slanted questions, we’re revealing that bias and we’re also again creating a little more suspicion. Oh, wait, you do have more information, like, hold on. And then they kind of feel like, oh, you don’t feel bamboozled. I went ahead and made, I staked my claim.
I put my flag out there. I made a position. Like, my position would completely change. Oh, man, you have that information, don’t you? Like, oh, and then they feel like you’re withholding. And then you can’t get them to stake into a position. Well, if you said this, then I feel this way, but if there’s this, then I feel that way.
And then now it’s like there are feedbacks all over the board. And if it feels unreliable and it is unreliable because they’ve given you so many different factors, [00:16:00] it’s because they just kind of lost trust in the process that this was, you know, firm, like these are the facts, then I will make a decision and I will give you feedback versus now it’s loosey goosey and I need more information.
And whenever you start to do a lot of focus groups, and if you’ve done a lot, then you understand. And if you’ve done a lot of jury trials, you also understand when you get that, Well, I just, if I had more information, well, I would just have so many questions and it’s like, Ooh, like that person probably will never be satisfied like they just, there’s always going to be more information that they want.
So therefore, they’re always going to be indecisive. And at some point, you got to make a decision of your own jury. And at some point folks group, we’re going to ask you to make a decision, plant your flag. All right. We ran through four quick questions. Factors sneaky, sometimes factors that can come in subconsciously and cause unreliable, or when a focus group or a flop as also you can call it [00:17:00] one would be again, having repeat participants can really cause a problem.
Having revealed your bias coming right out of the gate, saying who you are and who you represent, or subconsciously planting things like my case or my client in there, but just got to call that presentation down. Which leads me to my third one, which would be got to have some kind of visual aid. We got to keep people’s attention with these presentations, help them organize the facts or put it in a visual way again, just to provide the ability to look at something quickly and then be able to make a decision on it without making them juggle all the information.
And then finally slanted questions. And again, these are sneaky things. These are not things we are intending to slant, but when we do, it can really cause a little bit of disruption, people making decisions and giving us feedback. So I hope that this episode was helpful. And again, these are all mistakes that I have made, which then made me cringe.
And then did I [00:18:00] just waste all this time and effort to get this focus group together? So I want you to avoid the pain that I have. So if you have any questions or I’ve said something that may be. Causes you, huh, or a concern, please let me know. My email will be in the show notes and until next time, thank you.