Successful Innovation Does Not Come From Using Focus Groups

It's a worrying proven fact that the rate of success for new product concepts is under 20%, despite them being regularly vetted in focus groups. This should lead us to question whether the qualitative focus group will be the right tool to use for ideation or concept testing.
The concept of employing a focus group in NPD would be to discover and get the true emotions, experiences and opinions of customers - to be able to identify an unmet need or appraise the potential of an product idea (and, hopefully, improve upon it). However, during the last decade, there's been a change in opinion, amid increasing evidence that focus groups actually kill ideas, particularly the most creative ones.
So why's there the point that focus groups kill innovation? Maybe it comes down from many frustrating hours of watching focus groups and reading the consequent debriefs with heavy hearts. NPD and true innovation would depend on uncovering deep insights and unknown ways of issues that, often, consumers didn't know they'd. But from your experience, focus groups, by their very nature, are just not equipped to do this - for three key reasons:
1. An artificial environment
It's unsurprising that individuals fight to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas inside a focus group. It is, all things considered, an extremely unnatural environment - essentially strangers thrown together in the windowless room, being led by another stranger, knowing their every move and surveys are being watched by faceless others. Would this cause you to feel comfortable in revealing your deeper thoughts or even in expressing ideas?
Companies spend a lot of time and money on generating safe and creative atmospheres for internal ideation workshops and brainstorming. But we expect consumers to open up and spill the beans inside a totally artificial and non relaxing environment. Unsurprisingly, it simply doesn't happen.
2. The tip with the iceberg
According to behavioral economists, economic decision-making is 70 percent emotional and 30 % rational. In focus groups, the alternative is true. Consumers will rationalise their thoughts and responses. They will play the role of helpful by attempting to get rid of the emotion from other responses. Unfortunately, brands mainly live and experience emotion. Consumers go so far as to use hard to respond to your questions and provides opinions, even if they have no idea of the result or what you say isn't true. At best, focus groups give us a truthful and factual account of consumers' conscious thinking process - but this too, is problematic.
Neuroscientists claim that human beings is only able to access about 5% of these cognitive processes - that's, the thoughts, associations and emotions that happen in your brains. Harvard Business School professor, Gerald Zaltman, supports this theory in their excellent book How Customers Think. He writes: 'Most in the thoughts and feelings that influence consumers' and managers' behaviour happen in the unconscious mind.' And, in conclusion: 'Contrary to conventional wisdom, [focus groups] are not effective when developing and evaluating new service ideas.'
The fundamental concern is that focus groups are battling contrary to the fact that most of our opinion about is unconscious, and our emotions are intertwined with the reasoning. Consumers within these groups are certainly not being irrational or lazy, just unconscious (not literally, even though some in the focus groups we've watched...!)
3. Seeing the near future
Every brand wants to stand above everyone else by trying to differentiate itself from your competition. However, this may be the one thing that consumers in focus groups inherently dislike about new products and innovation ideas. They prefer to remain in 'familiar territory' using what is comfortable and expected, and in their current frame of reference. It's just human nature.
So, when focus groups are presented with the unfamiliar, their natural reaction is to respond with scepticism and doubt. And this may be the reason why many innovative ideas, products have difficulty taking off.
This can even be problematic when focus groups are used to test new ideas. In these cases, negative feedback often shuts down the concept before it even grows to market. Most people do not know what they want before they view it plus they can't understand an innovation that comes into solve a difficulty they don't yet know they've got. As Henry Ford famously said: "If I gave people the things they said they wanted, I would have made a faster horse".
So what's the solution?
So if consumers can't invent the near future - and asking people in focus groups what they want or need does not get these to - what is the best tactic in driving new ideas for innovation?
Now,  important link  than ever before, there is a broader spectrum of exploratory research methodologies for insight and idea generation - along with the choices are growing on a regular basis. Using these new and innovative methods allows us to - and our clients - please take a fresh perspective and understand consumers from new angles.
Ethnographic and 'in-situ' based research methods involve an anthropologist spending time with individuals while they go about their day-to-day lives, to be able to observe they normally use and experience products. The validity of those methods is finally starting out be recognised, after a period of derision. And people 'in-the-know' have become beginning to appreciate that approach can produce invaluable insights. Reach presenting an anthropologist as permanent member of our strategy team.
Success lies in spending quality, one-to-one time with people in natural settings, and using a proven method. It's important to comprehend the limitations and possibilities of shoppers' abilities to build and understand new ideas. We must have the ability to get rid of the blinkers and expands minds. We do this by showing consumers the long run - as well as the possibilities - developing a new frame of reference, which will help these phones visualise and understand new ideas and concepts.
The goal associated with a NPD or innovation process is sales and market success. We would like to understand the failure rate for brand spanking new products drop from well over 65% - along with the initial step is always to stop the default use of focus groups. They may are the quickest and cheapest strategy to gather consumer opinions, if the itrrrs likely that stacked against you they're surely a false economy.
Focus groups can be comfortable plus a known entity - but this may be the very antithesis of innovative thinking. To quote one with the world's most innovative thinkers, Albert Einstein, "Insanity [is] doing a similar thing continuously and expecting different results." So for true innovation, and a competitive advantage, try involving and dealing with consumers in a different way.