Focus Group: What it's purpose?

A focus group is a step taken within the music industry to gain accurate and honest feedback from the artist's target audience on a campaign. It involves presenting the campaign beginning with the website, followed by the digipak, and ending with the music video. The reason as to why you present the products in this order rather than showing the video or playing a song first, is so that you can gain a candid opinion as to what genre the audience think we're appealing to. It would be more valuable to find out how you could alter our campaign to impliment the genre conventions rather than have the audience view our products with a pre-conscieved idea as to what it is. In order to gain specific feedback, you prepare a variety of open, unbiased questions on each product individually as well as questions comparing the website and digipak and finally the campaign on the whole. The reason why we conduct 'focus groups' rather than surveys is so that we can get more accurate opinions fresh from their first viewing of the product without any outside influence.

Although our products at this stage aren't complete, it is good to test them on our target audience at this point as there is still time to develop them. There is still the advantage that we're not likely to be too attached to the work we've already done therefore making alterations shouldn't be hard.

We want to find out how to engage the audience, whether the genre is clear and if not, how we can make it clearer and whether our products link together clear to make one overall campaign. We need to avoid closed or biased questions as we won't get a precise response.