This cartoon is much less about focus teams than how we frequently use focus teams. Or actually any kind of market analysis.
Years in the past, I overheard some company mates joke about “the Oracles of Eden Prairie.” Eden Prairie is a suburb of Minneapolis, the place a number of focus teams occur.
These company mates went on to explain the unusual means of bringing new concepts (for campaigns or new merchandise or packaging designs) to be judged by “the Oracles of Eden Prairie” — eight randomly chosen individuals who had no thought how a lot energy their phrases held on whether or not these concepts made it.
Often they had been requested to opine on questions anybody would have hassle answering with any accuracy — like articulating their “unmet client wants.” Later, verbatim quotes had been taken from the main target teams to justify all types of selections, usually as unquestionable sources of reality.
I as soon as drew the Oracles of Eden Prairie in a cartoon on the high of a mountain, with a marketer climbing to ask, “Oh all-knowing focus group, inform me your unmet client wants, in order that we will create disruptive improvements for you.”
The Oracles reply: “Extra promotions” and “Make all the pieces cheaper.”
Stephan Gans at Pepsi not too long ago talked about utilizing an AI software from an organization known as Tastewise to analysis new snackfood taste concepts. Tastewise makes use of AI to investigate patterns in information from 5 million recipes, two million menus, and 22 billion social media interactions to floor insights no particular person client would ever be capable to articulate. I like this commentary:
“For those who would’ve requested customers, ‘tell us what you assume could be an ideal taste for this model,’ no person would have ever provide you with seaweed.
“Folks don’t affiliate that usually with a specialty snack from a model. However due to the form of listening and the outside-in work that we did, we had been capable of determine that out by means of the AI that’s embedded in that software.”
Not each market analysis software is correct for each market analysis query. Treating any supply of client insights as an oracle can lead you astray. They’re all instruments for decision-making, however shouldn’t exchange decision-making itself.
Listed here are a number of associated cartoons I’ve drawn through the years, together with one among my earliest in 2002 — again after I known as this sequence Model Camp:
“If advertising and marketing saved a diary, this is able to be it.”
– Ann Handley, Chief Content material Officer of MarketingProfs
