In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it. And so the company approached Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who had pioneered a new kind of market research, and asked him to find out why.
At the same time, the relatively new processed-food industry was determined to push ready-made food. Frozen foods had enjoyed a boost during the war because of tin rationing, and the first frozen ready meals were launched in 1952. More women were working outside the home, making the convenience of these meals especially appealing. Incomes were rising, too, during this postwar period, which gave families more money to spend on convenience items, and on trying out new dishes. Not all such products were new – cake mix, after all, had been around for decades – but in this postwar climate, the food industry assumed there would be a much larger market for them. And yet, cake mix sales were slow.
Dichter, who called his work “motivational research”, set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate.
Focus groups, which became widespread in the 50s, could illuminate the psychological complexities that blocked women’s buying habits. In one focus group from this period, a woman made a Freudian slip: “Especially when I’m in a hurry, I like foods that are time-consuming.” Her slip of the tongue, in the context of the conversation, revealed the woman’s conflicted feelings about convenience foods, even though she seemed to embrace them. As the moderator, Alfred Goldman, would later recall in a 1964 article for a trade journal, that slip inspired the other women in the group to talk more openly about how guilty they felt over serving prepared foods to their families.
Dichter was creative at coming up with solutions to the problems that focus groups revealed. As Bill Schlackman, a colleague of Dichter’s, would recall years later, in this case the solution was to assuage the housewives’ guilt by giving them more of a sense of participation. “How to do that?” He smiled. “By adding an egg.” With this simple adjustment to the recipe, sales of cake mixes took off. It was an early focus-group marketing triumph.
Focus groups came, over the course of the last century, to shape almost every aspect of our lives, from cake mix to Barbie dolls. Almost nothing is launched into the world without a focus group. Since the late 1980s, they have affected even the political discussions that ultimately determine what kind of society we can have, not to mention the toothpaste we use, the soap operas we watch, the news media we consume, and the video games we play. Focus groups have also helped to create and nourish a seemingly boundless culture of consultation, in which ordinary people weigh in on just about everything, before the people in charge make a decision. Aided by social media and other technologies, the scope of such consultation has, in recent years, expanded its reach with breathtaking speed, allowing companies to aggregate the views and feelings of millions of potential customers. (...)
Whatever the topic – travel, detergent or breast cancer – the focus group has certain commonalities. It is a discussion among a small group, usually numbering between eight and 12 people. Led by a trained moderator, the conversation is intended to answer specific questions for a client: hence the term “focus”. Even if it appears to be freewheeling, or to wander off track, the moderator usually knows where it is going. Often, the client is observing through a one-way mirror from the next room. The moderator might receive notes from the client during the discussion – perhaps demanding that she get the conversation back on track, or that she probe a little bit harder: how do those present really feel about making instant coffee in the privacy of their own homes?
The process looks like democracy in action, and most people enjoy participating. Yet focus groups are widely despised. The public resents the mediocre outcomes of a focus-grouped world, feeling that the culture of consultation dumbs down our politics, entertainment and just about everything else. The clients who commission focus groups to give feedback on a new product or political initiative resent the obligation to listen to ordinary, non-expert people, and often feel humiliated by their judgments. Everyone imagines the participants to be idiots. Since they remain a hugely popular way of understanding consumer tastes and voter opinions, why do we hate them so much? (...)
The story of the focus group is a story of the relationship between elites and the masses. The current culture of consultation has flourished and become more necessary in a period during which the actual power of ordinary people relative to the rich – whether in the workplace or the political arena – has greatly diminished. Listening is not the same as sharing power. At the same time that our society has become more unequal, and gaps in everyday experience much wider, the need for listening has only grown more obvious. Ordinary people – especially working-class women – don’t have much political or economic power. In addition to telegraphing some of the desires of such people to cultural, political and corporate elites, the focus group is a ritual allowing those elites to send the message that they are listening (and sometimes even responding).
Over the past decade and a half, whenever protesters have gathered to defend the values of the left – values of equality and inclusion – they have chanted: “This is what democracy looks like.” A focus group, whether convened in an office park in Columbus, Ohio, or in a brightly lit conference room on Madison Avenue, is not at all what democracy looks like. But a focus group is, in some ways, what democratic participation now feels like. It is one of the ways we crack the egg and feel we are doing something. It has been part of the evolution of our expressive democracy – that is, a society in which the expression of opinion has been dramatically democratised, while the distribution of everything else that matters (political power, money) has only grown more starkly unequal.
The focus group offers us the experience of having a voice and the possibility of influence in a world that offers most people little control over their lives, and little opportunity to influence anything. “Perhaps they will use my idea!” one hopes. Maybe the movie ending I voted on will prevail, saving viewers around the world from sadness or banality. Or perhaps I’ll see my own language in this antacid commercial. A focus group – with brand managers, campaign managers and all kinds of other important people behind the mirror hanging anxiously on every laboured word of these ordinary people’s discussion – can feel like a populist triumph. It takes quite a ritual to produce that feeling.
Most people in the corporate or political elite have no idea what the majority of people – whose votes or consumer dollars they badly need to win – are like. They don’t know people who are not like themselves. Elites live in different neighbourhoods and have different values and habits from most people. Speaking of the clients on the other side of the mirror, former moderator Kara Gilmour says: “A lot of those people are really out of touch. They think they have all the answers because they’re the professionals. But when was the last time that they went shopping in a mid-range mall? They never shop in a mid-range mall. They get all their clothes at the sample sales.”
This vast gulf in mindset and everyday experience between ordinary people and elites is the reason the focus group needs to exist at all. In the US, amid the relentless mid-century anti-Communist propaganda campaigns and purges, with successful radical and populist political movements a distant memory, we became reconciled to having elites. Yet for consumer capitalism and democracy to flourish, those elites would need ways to measure the thoughts and feelings of the rest of the public. The ruling classes – and even the professional managerial classes that make decisions for those rulers – might be increasingly disconnected from ordinary people, but they had to know what the people wanted in order to sell them things and win their votes.
by Liza Featherstone, The Guardian | Read more:
At the same time, the relatively new processed-food industry was determined to push ready-made food. Frozen foods had enjoyed a boost during the war because of tin rationing, and the first frozen ready meals were launched in 1952. More women were working outside the home, making the convenience of these meals especially appealing. Incomes were rising, too, during this postwar period, which gave families more money to spend on convenience items, and on trying out new dishes. Not all such products were new – cake mix, after all, had been around for decades – but in this postwar climate, the food industry assumed there would be a much larger market for them. And yet, cake mix sales were slow.Dichter, who called his work “motivational research”, set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate.
Focus groups, which became widespread in the 50s, could illuminate the psychological complexities that blocked women’s buying habits. In one focus group from this period, a woman made a Freudian slip: “Especially when I’m in a hurry, I like foods that are time-consuming.” Her slip of the tongue, in the context of the conversation, revealed the woman’s conflicted feelings about convenience foods, even though she seemed to embrace them. As the moderator, Alfred Goldman, would later recall in a 1964 article for a trade journal, that slip inspired the other women in the group to talk more openly about how guilty they felt over serving prepared foods to their families.
Dichter was creative at coming up with solutions to the problems that focus groups revealed. As Bill Schlackman, a colleague of Dichter’s, would recall years later, in this case the solution was to assuage the housewives’ guilt by giving them more of a sense of participation. “How to do that?” He smiled. “By adding an egg.” With this simple adjustment to the recipe, sales of cake mixes took off. It was an early focus-group marketing triumph.
Focus groups came, over the course of the last century, to shape almost every aspect of our lives, from cake mix to Barbie dolls. Almost nothing is launched into the world without a focus group. Since the late 1980s, they have affected even the political discussions that ultimately determine what kind of society we can have, not to mention the toothpaste we use, the soap operas we watch, the news media we consume, and the video games we play. Focus groups have also helped to create and nourish a seemingly boundless culture of consultation, in which ordinary people weigh in on just about everything, before the people in charge make a decision. Aided by social media and other technologies, the scope of such consultation has, in recent years, expanded its reach with breathtaking speed, allowing companies to aggregate the views and feelings of millions of potential customers. (...)
Whatever the topic – travel, detergent or breast cancer – the focus group has certain commonalities. It is a discussion among a small group, usually numbering between eight and 12 people. Led by a trained moderator, the conversation is intended to answer specific questions for a client: hence the term “focus”. Even if it appears to be freewheeling, or to wander off track, the moderator usually knows where it is going. Often, the client is observing through a one-way mirror from the next room. The moderator might receive notes from the client during the discussion – perhaps demanding that she get the conversation back on track, or that she probe a little bit harder: how do those present really feel about making instant coffee in the privacy of their own homes?
The process looks like democracy in action, and most people enjoy participating. Yet focus groups are widely despised. The public resents the mediocre outcomes of a focus-grouped world, feeling that the culture of consultation dumbs down our politics, entertainment and just about everything else. The clients who commission focus groups to give feedback on a new product or political initiative resent the obligation to listen to ordinary, non-expert people, and often feel humiliated by their judgments. Everyone imagines the participants to be idiots. Since they remain a hugely popular way of understanding consumer tastes and voter opinions, why do we hate them so much? (...)
The story of the focus group is a story of the relationship between elites and the masses. The current culture of consultation has flourished and become more necessary in a period during which the actual power of ordinary people relative to the rich – whether in the workplace or the political arena – has greatly diminished. Listening is not the same as sharing power. At the same time that our society has become more unequal, and gaps in everyday experience much wider, the need for listening has only grown more obvious. Ordinary people – especially working-class women – don’t have much political or economic power. In addition to telegraphing some of the desires of such people to cultural, political and corporate elites, the focus group is a ritual allowing those elites to send the message that they are listening (and sometimes even responding).
Over the past decade and a half, whenever protesters have gathered to defend the values of the left – values of equality and inclusion – they have chanted: “This is what democracy looks like.” A focus group, whether convened in an office park in Columbus, Ohio, or in a brightly lit conference room on Madison Avenue, is not at all what democracy looks like. But a focus group is, in some ways, what democratic participation now feels like. It is one of the ways we crack the egg and feel we are doing something. It has been part of the evolution of our expressive democracy – that is, a society in which the expression of opinion has been dramatically democratised, while the distribution of everything else that matters (political power, money) has only grown more starkly unequal.
The focus group offers us the experience of having a voice and the possibility of influence in a world that offers most people little control over their lives, and little opportunity to influence anything. “Perhaps they will use my idea!” one hopes. Maybe the movie ending I voted on will prevail, saving viewers around the world from sadness or banality. Or perhaps I’ll see my own language in this antacid commercial. A focus group – with brand managers, campaign managers and all kinds of other important people behind the mirror hanging anxiously on every laboured word of these ordinary people’s discussion – can feel like a populist triumph. It takes quite a ritual to produce that feeling.
Most people in the corporate or political elite have no idea what the majority of people – whose votes or consumer dollars they badly need to win – are like. They don’t know people who are not like themselves. Elites live in different neighbourhoods and have different values and habits from most people. Speaking of the clients on the other side of the mirror, former moderator Kara Gilmour says: “A lot of those people are really out of touch. They think they have all the answers because they’re the professionals. But when was the last time that they went shopping in a mid-range mall? They never shop in a mid-range mall. They get all their clothes at the sample sales.”
This vast gulf in mindset and everyday experience between ordinary people and elites is the reason the focus group needs to exist at all. In the US, amid the relentless mid-century anti-Communist propaganda campaigns and purges, with successful radical and populist political movements a distant memory, we became reconciled to having elites. Yet for consumer capitalism and democracy to flourish, those elites would need ways to measure the thoughts and feelings of the rest of the public. The ruling classes – and even the professional managerial classes that make decisions for those rulers – might be increasingly disconnected from ordinary people, but they had to know what the people wanted in order to sell them things and win their votes.
by Liza Featherstone, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Leon Edler
