Marketing Focus Group Activity

One more thread to record my experience of a marketing focus group. Tagged ‘Focus Group’.

I completed this activity in order to answer the following…..

Marketing question: how can we improve customer satisfaction?

Research question: What constitutes a competent exercise therapist?

Reflections…..

I had to change my initial marketing and research questions and they were too focussed and almost warranted a direct answer that would not give further insight.

I had to exclude an amount of the data collected. This included observer comments, discussions about software outside of our remit, and location specific issues, any career management issues, any focus groups politics and any comments about individuals/specific organisations. These themes stray from the marketing research question and/or pose ethical issues.

One of my questions asked participants to complete a sentence and for ethical reasons I had to conduct this before the focus group and individually so that there was no influence from other group members. It was useful in order to gauge customer perceptions of the role that students had to fulfil. Answers ranged from safety to knowing policy, and no one was able to pinpoint one aspect as the most important. I have yet to determine how to merge these findings with those of the group discussion.

There were issues in my sample group in that only one organisation was represented – a number of others failed to attend. This may skew findings in that they could be location specific and only reflect specific experiences.

Identifying themes from a recording was fine but then attaining a frequency count proved a little difficult. Does one person discussing the same theme twice count? If the theme is repeated should it be counted again? I chose to count a theme each time it was mentioned whether that be by the same person or others, as I feel this represents how important it is to the customer.

Two themes that arose were the ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ aspects of the job. With a ratio of 8:5 in favour of practical application. This information is useful be use it may help us to design training in order to meet customer expectations. Presently there is an emphasis on ‘theory’ that may need to be addressed.

My observer feedback states that there was no need to hold a period of silence, as participants were fully engaged. I believe my initial question required a moment of silence, possibly because this was the start of the group and people weren’t quite at ease yet. Nine the mess the short silence allowed them to think and prompted someone in the group to kick things off.

New Venture Creation Challenge…

A new thread (tagged NVC) to record learning and reflections relating to my Entrepreneurship module.

A team of us are starting a ‘New Venture Creation’ challenge in a week or so and this will be the place to keep track of it.

The reflections will also form part of my final assessment on this module.  Looking forward to creating a new venture with the rest of the team!

A Recurring Experience….

So I had an experience today that I’ve had a number of times before and thought it was high time I reflected on it.

You may well relate to the experience I’m about to describe and I’d be interested to hear of any similar experiences….

Have you ever had the feeling that someone has come to a meeting with something on their chest already? You know, something that might have happened a while ago, unrelated to the meeting, but is driving their responses, tone and general approach to the topic at hand. Clouding their judgemental even. It may seem like an obvious scenario, and perhaps I’ve been a little slow to pick up on the frequency of it, but put in the context of my experiences over the last 11 years there’s a good learning opportunity here.

So that’s what I now know that I experienced today and reviewing these events has helped me to make sense of things a little better. Today’s events were tiring. My intentions, leadership and integrity were questioned – I tried to remain calm and not adopt the approach I was being presented with. Like before it wasn’t a nice experience. What I saw as a sensible course of action was challenged, based on someone believing that I wanted to make them look bad. If you know me that’s not my style, and I guess because I believe helping people to achieve their goals is important, its an uncomfortable thing to be labelled with. Never the less, that’s what happened, that was how they felt and I must have had a part in making them them feel like that. I’ve got to take some responsibility.

What can I conclude from today and similar previous experiences? Well, I have to accept that my actions might not always be taken in the manner that they are intended. In this scenario my intention has been to highlight a threat to our operations in order to present drivers for change. Perhaps I could have used different language, perhaps I could have done it in a different forum – but I didn’t and as a rare occurrence I’m not going to be too harsh on myself about it. Despite my reasonably good understanding of emotional intelligence, there are limits to how well we can predict people’s responses to our actions. Yes I do believe we should consider people’s values and beliefs when communicating, and I continue to try and do that as best as I can, indeed I’m still learning. However, what I can conclude is that it’s not always possible to determine how best to frame and issue in order not to offend others, or what language to use that they can relate to – sometimes you just don’t know what else they might bring with them emotionally….. A previous conversation that upset them that they haven’t cleared up? A strong value of others seeing them succeed without ever getting something wrong? Cultural and peer pressure that interprets mistakes as incompetence rather than a learning opportunity? You simply just can’t cater for everything.

So, perhaps for the first time, I’m not going to beat myself up about this. I feel sad because I’m not sure that a relationship will be the same after today’s events. With difficulty, I’m going to take away a ‘non-arrogant’ view that sometimes the response you get just couldn’t have been avoided. The person involved is amazing and I want to see them achieve their goals – they’ll meet them easily – I’d still like to help them get there but that’s clearly their choice now. Perhaps a little time will help provide an opportunity for me to let them know that. What I can do from here is take what I have learnt about them, and perhaps others that are similar in the organisation, and try a different approach next time.