FMP- Fashion Magazine Focus Group

Today I conducted a small focus group, as a part of my primary research for my final major project on fashion magazines. This allowed me to get more detailed responses to the questions that I wrote especially for this focus group.

Here is the video that is posted on my Youtube channel:

I just recorded this footage on my Iphone and uploaded in a low resolution, as I primarily needed this for the audio information.

The answers and opinions that I got during the focus group included a variety of responses. A lot of which depended on the individual and personal preference, for example what interests you and other opinionated questions.

The advantages of a focus group is that it can save money and time, as this could be a replacement for individual interviews with just one person at a time. It also gives them a chance to confer/exchange opinions and preferences. It also provides a broader range of information and useful material for primary research.

The disadvantages of focus groups are that they can be difficult to control/manage, as people could be talking over each other which is what happened in my focus group. Also irrelevant topics could come up and therefore time wasting on subjects which are not that useful. Some people could feel pressured to agree with the dominant response.

I found out during this focus group that not all of the audience that buy high end fashion magazines, are actually looking to buy luxury fashion. They instead enjoy the unique photography and read to help spark creative style choices and for in season trend inspiration.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small group of people, usually around 3-6, where someone is asking a series of questions on a certain topic of subject, which turns into a discussion used for market research. Focus groups are a chance to get more detailed answers and also to gain consumers opinions on the subject. Although this can be a good way of collecting useful data, it is considered quite a time consuming task and does not often provide a large number/variety of answers.

In our focus group we had a few questions that we wanted to ask and wrote this on a discussion template, here is the video clip of our focus group.

Here is a screenshot of the discussion template which we completed before the focus group, so I had an idea of what questions to ask within the discussion.

Last week we watched a YouTube video on focus groups, this video had different groups of people at a desk, three at a time, where they were asked the same questions on a smart phone they were given. The groups of people included young girls aged around 20, children aged 5, typical goths, muscly men and more. These people all had very different views on the smart phone and the video demonstrated the sheer variety of answers and opinions people have.

Here is a link to this video: Smart Phone Focus Group