FMCG brands have used focus groups to garner insights from consumers since the 1940s. They’ve proven to be an effective way to help brand managers understand what motivates consumers to buy their products and develop a better understanding of their customers’ needs and wants.

However, many brands have been forced to look into alternative options due to the difficulty of arranging in-person focus groups during the pandemic. Like so many other areas of business, this COVID-enforced challenge may be a blessing in disguise for those brands who choose to view it that way. There are alternatives to focus groups that deliver better insights and/or address some of the many weaknesses of focus groups that I’ve outlined below.

Reasons Why You Need an Alternative to Focus Groups

Aside from COVID-driven reasons not to run focus groups, there are many pre-existing reasons why relying solely on them would be foolish for an FMCG brand. The following are just a few of those reasons:

1. Focus Groups are a Contrived Experience

Ever wondered how a focus group is put together? It probably started off with a text message like this:

Good afternoon, short notice I know but I have a focus group on Monday at lunchtime 12.30 – 13.30 for people responsible for buying breakfast cereal for their family. The incentive is €50. If you’d like to participate text me a time that suits for a quick call and I’ll sign you up.

I am on a couple of focus group panels so I regularly receive messages just like that. Mainly I go along for professional reasons but that’s not the case for nearly everyone else. Many participate to get out and have a free glass of wine with some new people (when we were allowed do that) or to make a few quid on the side (there’s generally an incentive to show up). Although the organiser sometimes calls to check that I’m a relevant consumer, there’s no way she can be sure about it unless it’s gender specific or something like that. That means focus groups can easily include a number of totally irrelevant consumers. That is frequently the case with me and if I happen to be the loudest mouth in the group, I can have a significant impact on that session. Ultimately, this may lead to you basing key decisions on flawed data because:

• the participants, or at least a significant subsection of them, may not actually represent your target market;
• unless you’re running an awful lot of different groups, a few loud mouths can have undue influence on your results; and
• the contrived circumstances mean the consumers are not in the same frame of mind that they might be when actually purchasing or consuming the product.

2. Focus Groups Are Expensive

In order to reduce some of the risk factors listed above, it’s often necessary to run a lot of focus groups. That means incentivising loads of people. It means paying your staff and/or expensive consultants to run the sessions and report on the results. It means renting space and buying drinks. All of this adds up very quickly and makes focus groups an expensive option, particularly for smaller brands.

3. A Moment-in-Time

This is my biggest problem with focus groups. They only reflect an opinion at a particular moment-in-time. It makes complete sense to run focus groups during the product development stage and pre-launch because there is no consumer experience data to track at that stage.

However, once your product is out in the wild, there are thousands or potentially millions of data points you could be tracking every day.

5 Reasons Why On-Pack Customer Surveys are an FMCG Brand’s Best Alternative to Focus Groups

1. Real Customers

The overriding reason why on-pack customer surveys are the best alternative to focus groups is that it guarantees that the data you’re basing important decisions on is derived from real customers. This may seem like the most obvious thing in the world but it can be difficult to get right. New brands or products in new categories have a particular challenge in this regard. Sometimes you want to get feedback from people who are familiar with your product and this presents a challenge when your brand is not that widely known or the product sits within a new category that people are unfamiliar with.

2. Real-Time Data Collected at the Point of Consumption

Even if you do manage to get real customers into a focus group, it may have been a long time since they used or consumed your product. That means they could be basing their answers and opinions on a distant memory and completely out of the context of the product experience. That contrasts poorly with a situation where you collect data at the point of consumption of the product. This is when consumers are most emotionally connected to the product, whether that be a positive or negative connection. Data captured at this time will more accurately reflect the true sentiment of consumers than in a staged focus group 6 months later.

3. Volume of Data / Structured Data

Focus groups are great at capturing qualitative data. You can really get into the weeds about what a consumer thinks about a product or category. But they fail miserably when it comes to the volume of data captured and its value in terms of quantitative analysis. Even the largest brands would struggle to put enough focus groups together to generate a big enough sample size for it to be deemed reliable.

On the other hand, even a relatively small FMCG product is going to have thousands of customers using it every week. Even if only 50 of those customers give you feedback each week, you’ll still end up with 2600 pieces of feedback at the end of the year. Collecting that many views would take a lot of time and money using focus groups.

4. Trend Analysis

This is where on-pack customer surveys come into their own. As I mentioned above, focus groups only give you the consumer perspective at a particular moment-in-time unless you run them extremely regularly. That reduces your ability to track consumer experience over time because you simply don’t have enough data to do it properly. And data is so important today.

A good (and real) example of this that I came across recently involved a frozen food manufacturer who started getting complaints about one of their flagship products. This is a product that had been on the market and selling successfully for a number of years but all of a sudden, they were seeing a significant drop off in customer satisfaction. It turns out, that an error had been made in their manufacturing process and a single batch of product had been “washed” in the same water that was used to clean the previous batch. Without the data they captured from their customers, this would have gone unnoticed and could potentially have happened more than once. Ultimately, that would have cost the business thousands of customers and maybe millions of Euro.

5. Value Creation and Cost Effectiveness

Running anon-pack customer survey doesn’t have to be expensive. If you’ve only one SKU and not too many customers, you could probably do it with a free plan from one of the many survey tools available online. The only real costs in that case would be making the necessary changes to your packaging and your time.

For best results and in order to track and compare the performance of different products and variants, you will need a more sophisticated tool than that. Platforms like SeeGap empower you to dig into the data and extract valuable insights such as identifying a product variant that is putting people off your brand for example. The long term value of such insights far outweighs the cost of the solution. In fact, a year’s subscription to such a solution might equate to the cost of only a couple of focus groups.

Convinced of the value of on-pack customer surveys?

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you to take a closer look at on-pack customer surveys as a viable alternative to focus groups for your brand(s). But, as you might expect, if it was easy to get customers to provide feedback, all brands would already be doing it. The reality is it is challenging, but it’s far from impossible. In my next blog post I’ll explain how to do it in such a way as to maximise engagement and value generation.