Focus groups have a bad reputation in entertainment. Movie directors especially love to moan about being forced to compromise their artistic vision to satisfy some focus group. But outside of entertainment, businesses are desperate for data about their customers.
When I worked in advertising, I watched focus groups on topics from a new model of printer to what people think of their phone company versus their cable tv provider. All these companies spent big money to learn about their customers.
But magicians, whatever their artistic vision, had no choice. There was just no focus group research on magic.
That’s not true anymore. Over the past decade or so, Andy (not his real name) who writes thejerx.com, worked with Andrew Costello to run several focus groups on magic.
There are limitations to focus group research, but this is pretty much the only actual scientific data available on the subject. And the results contradict some of magic’s most cherished conventional wisdom.
This is why companies do focus groups: quite often, conventional wisdom is wrong. The phone company I mentioned assumed that people liked their phone company much more than their cable company. The exact opposite was true.
The Limits of Focus Group Results
There are two things you have to remember when looking at any focus group results.
1) People may not behave the same in a focus group as they do in real life.
In a survey, People often respond with what they think the answer should be, rather than what it is. People can also be strongly influenced by other people in the group—google “Asch Conformity Line Experiment” if you doubt this.
In one legendary (in the advertising world) example, a company were testing a new music player. They had samples available for people to try out, in two different colors, yellow and black. Yellow was overwhelmingly preferred.
At the end, the participants were told they could each take one of the devices. Everybody took a black one.
