Are Group Chat Apps Replacing Traditional Focus Groups?

Since the 1940s, businesses have convened small groups of people to understand their needs and wants in order to create and sell better products and services.  

For much of this time, traditional focus groups have had a powerful impact, but they’ve also been a resource-heavy approach for companies, requiring space to accommodate participants and team members (think beige rooms with one-way windows, bottles of water, coffee in polystyrene foam cups), as well as incurring high costs in terms of time and travel.  

The focus-group landscape has rapidly changed. And while the constraints of COVID-19 accelerated the use of technology for focus groups, it’s actually nothing new. For the past couple of decades, businesses have been experimenting with text-based group chat platforms as a way to conduct meaningful focus groups while using fewer resources. 

The Benefits of App-Based Focus Groups 

Zach Adams is the vice president of strategy at Drive Research, a national market-research company based in New York. Drive Research builds custom qualitative and quantitative studies for a variety of different industries, helping to make organizations more successful by extracting insights from the data they collect to accelerate business strategy. 

With about 15 years of experience under his belt, Adams has seen – and used – a wide array of tools for conducting focus groups. While in-person groups continue to appeal in some cases, and COVID-19 saw a tremendous spike in video-based groups, Adams is a strong advocate for the possibilities of choosing to use focus-group chat software in numerous situations. 

“We refer to [it] as asynchronous research,” he explains. Perhaps the clearest benefit is scale – if you want to include 50 people in focus groups, an app allows you to engage them all at once over the course of a handful of days, rather than conducting 10 hour-long sessions with five people each. “It’s like a closed chatroom,” he says. “You create a profile and you hold a conversation over the course of three days or five days that covers the same topics that you’d cover in a one to two-hour discussion.” 

In the future, in-person research will still be available, but virtual research is now really normalized, accepted, and anticipated.

—Zach Adams, vice president of strategy, Drive Research

Apps are also a solve for geography. A business that wants to conduct focus-group research in multiple markets would traditionally need to spend money on travel to get researchers and other team members in place to attend the groups live. With chat, participants can be sourced in multiple markets without anyone having to leave home. Plus, researchers may have the opportunity to reach participants who represent important demographics but are not sufficiently concentrated in a single demographic area to justify a unique focus group. 

Adams notes that moderation remains important in app-based focus groups – you still need an experienced voice in the mix to guide the conversation and ensure that no one point of view dominates the discussion. “One of the real benefits is that you can essentially get 50 people to talk to each other at once,” he says. This is in contrast with a traditional focus group, where six participants are usually the maximum at any one time (to be effective, he recommends that video focus groups should be even smaller). “Personally, as a researcher, I’ve always thought text-based groups are awesome,” says Adams. “And when we do them, they work out really well – you can do them with any audience.” 

What to Watch Out For 

No research tool is perfect. It’s essential to identify the potential pitfalls of text-based focus groups, and to prepare to navigate them if they crop up. As with any focus group, it’s important to make sure that everyone gets a chance to contribute and that a handful of strong personalities aren’t allowed to solely drive the discussion. Far from becoming obsolete when groups are not conducted in person, the role of the focus-group moderator may be more important than ever. “The moderator’s responsibility is to control and curtail groupthink,” says Adams.  

Text-based focus-group apps are, in their essence, a kind of social media. And just like other forms of social media, the relative anonymity of an app can make users feel emboldened to communicate in ways that they wouldn’t dream of if they were sitting around a table with their fellow group members. For this reason, it’s important that the moderator makes the ground rules very clear from the beginning and reiterates them when necessary throughout the process. 

Depending on the product or service that’s being researched, cutting the in-person element out of a focus group may mean removing key aspects of people’s responses – think facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. Adams points out that there can be workarounds for this – for example, if a focus group requires that participants interact with a physical product, “you can also send the product out to someone who then gives feedback,” he says, which can be collected in a group chat app. In addition, focus group apps increasingly offer opportunities for researchers to integrate requests for audio and video from participants that they can easily fulfill with smartphones. 

How To Get Started With Chat-Based Focus Groups

If you’ve decided that using chat-based focus groups is right for your business, getting started is simple. First, it can be helpful to confirm your desired timelines. According to Adams, typical projects take six to 12 weeks to execute, depending on how much lead time is provided to partners in order to recruit participants and schedule the sessions. Rigorous preparation of research questions by a small-business owner can help to cut down on lead time, but research firms can also offer valuable expertise in producing research briefs as part of their service.

Using consumer targets, research budgets for chat-based focus groups will generally range between $20,000 and $40,000: differentiating factors include how many people you want to participate, the breadth or complexity of the audience you’d like to research, and the extent of the topics that need to be discussed.  

“Typical in-person groups can start at $4,000 if you’re talking about local-area, single focus groups of eight to 12 participants. That type of research may only take two or three weeks to execute,” Adams says. But that usually only scratches the surface. “A typical focus-group project that includes multiple groups, say eight to 12, across various cities/markets; the need to recruit participants to, and rental of, various facilities to hold the groups; plus adding in travel costs and other out-of-pockets – those budgets can start between $50,000 and $100,000 and scale up depending on complexity, markets, number of groups held, and a variety of operational and participant-incentive costs. Timelines are months long and carry goals to be presented to an executive leadership team.” At this scale, chat-based focus groups become the most efficient choice.

Ready to get started? In addition to Drive Research, there are numerous firms offering services for small businesses looking to run chat-based focus groups: InsideHeads, Touchstone Research, and Respondent.io are examples of other organizations that lead in the field.

What’s Next? 

Adams firmly believes that online, text-based focus groups are here to stay, and will increasingly become a go-to option for businesses conducting research. “I would say that, in the future, in-person research will still be available, but virtual research is now really normalized, accepted, and anticipated,” he says. “The future of research is now going to move towards a hybrid method.” 

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