Oh Go On - Pry Into People's Personal Lives

Recently finished a series of focus groups testing ad concepts. Fairly standard fare. As part of the concept, the agency presented us with some materials that attempted to show what people did in their private lives if they had spare time. The agency attempted to use humour to illustrate this, and our client (rightfully so) disagreed with he approach.

However, what the client asked us to do in the groups was "find-out what people do privately in their spare time" so that we could present creative that was relevant. This too, was also a noble goal. The issue was, however, that the entire two hours of the groups were taken-up by testing about 16 different versions of the creative, so all we could do is once we presented the creative with the spare time concept, we asked "what kinds of indulgences do you do with your spare time?"

The question absolutely flopped, and the client was quite insistent on asking it. In all of the groups that I did, participants said things like "I thought you said these groups were confidential" and "You expect us to tell you that?" While I was able to manoeuvre around those objections and get to some sort of answer, I knew the response was far from truthful, honest or thorough.

While I have very little concern about this for the project I was doing (the main objective was concept testing - this was just an very incidental add-on), what bugs me is that my client was unable to see that this question would get him no valuable information. For some reason, he felt that it was OK, in the middle of a focus group, to stop everything and ask people to reveal what they indulge in during their free time - and what was worse, is that he actually expected people to shift gears and answer the question.

The issue is that during the concept testing, people were very much thinking "in their heads" - they were evaluating, using logic, rating the ads, etc... They were not in their emotions, and were not at a place where they could share anything significant about their lives - yet smack in the middle of a group, the client expected to gather this information.

What concerns me is that there are people out there who are responsible for advertising and communication and still feel that people function like robots and approach things in a strictly logical and patterned way. "They're being exposed to activities they do in their free time in the ads, so ask them about the indulgences..." When I mentioned that he probably would not get much information out of this, the client just seemed to look through me, as if he did not understand.

Anyhow, the creative test went well, and the client got the information needed. Moreover, this was not a time to tell the client to do a fancy projective or other psychological exploration of free-time activities. What this client does need to learn, however, is that people are not logical, but emotional. Once the client accepts that, he may be open to the idea that emotions (such as fear of exposing oneself in a focus group) follow their own set of rules and patterns, and that there is a certain logic to those "soft mushy" emotions that can be used both in focus group and effective communications campaigns.