Customer Reviews

The Focus Group: A Strategic Guide to Organizing, Conducting and Analyzing the Focus Group Interview

5 star:		(1)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

For anyone who works in creating strategies on securing better ways to create customer value, researching what customers think is a mandatory part of the process.

This book has two levels - the high level teaches you how to run and analyse a focus group approach to securing this information.

For the more experienced, there are the jewels of her experience in things that can be done better or those little insights that enable us to find the diamond inside tons of carbon like ideas.

I have re-read this book many times and have always found something extra that I had missed on the previous occasion.

For anyone doing post-graduate research through people and interviews, this book is mandatory.

For anyone in business, this book allows you to challenge the research guru class that can (if you let them) take you in directions that are not always the best ones to travel.

Worth the investment.

Faley Templeton seems to know a lot about focus groups but i think she could have spent more time on structuring her book. She talks a lot about her daily experience and her personal opinion on testing aspects. As a novice to this subject I expected a kick-start on how to conduct focus groups - with more facts and basics. This seems to be a book for experts who want to get some additional insight from another expert.

i'm annoyed with myself for buying it because this is totally not what i was hoping for. i needed a book that matches this book's byline "A Strategic Guide to Organizing..." and in my mind it doesn't live up to that. This book definitely needs to have a "warning: experts only" or "warning: academics only" the way that computer books do. then i could have bought the introductory book that i needed instead of this piece of work that reads like something aimed at a college professor instead of a working professional.

Why didn't I listen to the other reviewers before buying this book? The critiques offered were spot on, and if anything too mild.

I bought this book with the idea of learning about how to use focus groups in launching a new business. I will have to look elsewhere. But since the book was so deliciously bad, I am going to enjoy trashing it here. Or, as the author (who by the way has a PHd in Psychology) would probably say: it is highly cathartic to vent dissonence, substantiating real and or percieved loss of value through providing feedback in a forum of peers".

1) Other reviewers already mentioned this book reads like a doctoral thesis. Much too generous. I would say it reads like the "Duke University Post-Graduate Journal of Letters of the Deptartment of Deconstructing Marketing Psychology".

2) The book is chock full of self-promotion. If the author needs to establish credentials, the introduction is the place to do it. To insert your resume into the text of the book is just annoying.

3) The chapters titles often provide no clue as to what the chapter is supposed to be about. This is particularly damning, since reading the chapters themselves doesn't always solve the riddle. I defy you to guess the subject of these chapters:
"The Technical Revolution" - Chapter 3
"The Technical Revolution II: The Second Coming" - Chapter 4
"The Theoretical Concept" - Chapter 5
"The Soul of the Focus Group" - Chapter 6
The titles of sub-chapters were equally inane. A few random examples: "What Am I Bid?"; "People Boxes"; "Shifting Gears".

4) Much of the book is simply off topic. I understood this to be a guide to planning and implementing focus groups. If only. Two chapters are historical digressions into the roots of focus groups. Another chapter surveys the psychology of consumerism. Some chapters I still don't know what they were supposed to be about. Elsewhere the book plumbs such issues as the gripes of quantitative researchers towards the qualitative researchers, the authors stream of consiousness as she prepares herself for writing reports, the role of advertising in society, etc.

5) The book does not tackle the very pertinent question of what types of marketing problems are best solved with focus groups, and what types are best solved with surveys. Given the amount of academic soul-searching the author engages in, this is inexusable.

This book was not a complete waste. I did get some useful information from reading it. However, page for page, it was the most narcissistic book I have ever bought.

i'm annoyed with myself for buying it because this is totally not what i was hoping for. i needed a book that matches this book's byline "A Strategic Guide to Organizing..." and in my mind it doesn't live up to that. This book definitely needs to have a "warning: experts only" or "warning: academics only" the way that computer books do. then i could have bought the introductory book that i needed instead of this piece of work that reads like something aimed at a college professor instead of a working professional.

the frustrating part here is that there *is* good information in here, it just takes 4 times longer to extract it and digest it than you can with a book that's utilizes plain lanuguage, better typesetting and layout, and some degree of user-friendliness. to make an analogy: i needed the "Mac" version of this information and what i bought was the commandline unix version.

I would not recommend buying this book. The information covered in it is also covered in other books, but this one is exceptionally long-winded. On top of that, there is a plethora of typographical errors (which drive me absolutely nuts in a published, hardcopy book).