Focus Groups - Helped or Hurt or both

[JaneAusten]

I guess I think they could be useful if they were actually used to gather feedback to improve and not to punish or fire or reward strictly based on a focus group score. I think there is value in getting unbiased feedback because honestly where can you even get that anymore.Snail mail can even be spammed in a way in fact I remember someone at one show doing a test where 5 people mailed letters to the mailroom clerk at the show from 20 diff locations or diff return addresses each and the mailroom clerk for 1 week had the highest mailcount on the show. THats not the same as gathering feedback but it showed that even mailcounts which was supposed to be something the show kept track of could also be manipulated by fanbases

[Skin]

That's very true. I know the head writer for Gossip Girl doesn't even pay attention to any blogs, fan mail, email, etc. because he says this exact thing. You will only hear from a certain group of people when they are unhappy or if something upsets them. You hardly hear anything about what they want because usually the happy people don't comment at all. Most of the time viewers just want to bitch about what's wrong with the show which is a valid point. There is a lot of negativity for everything now a days.

[Gray Bunny]

I think focus groups are a reflection of what the powers-that-be WISH they could get as an audience. If they were a true reflection of what the actual viewers wanted, Maggie Horton would've been front and center for the past 25 years.

[Skin]

Exactly and that is the main problem with them. Soaps were never going to be marketed towards the audience they wanted and their attempts to market themselves to an audience that didn't exist for them wound up killing the audience they did have. Focus groups themselves aren't a bad thing it tells you what a certain demographic wants. It's the fact that the demographic that soaps needed/wanted was not willing to watch them at least not live and that was the problem.

[teplin]

Focus groups work for testing goods and services, but they're an abomination for any creative endeavor -- that includes soaps, prime time TV, movies, stage shows and more, all of which are being focus grouped to death these days. I'm only surprised it hasn't happened with books. (Maybe it has and I'm just not aware of it.) With soaps especially, you can't ask someone who's never viewed the show before what they think of a certain character or storyline after viewing two or three episodes, there's no context for the viewer to make a good judgment. In terms of asking about possible future storylines, what sounds questionable in a two-line summary can be magic on screen (and vice versa). Creative people should be free to create and adjust if necessary in response to ratings. The fact that focus groups have been used extensively in the last 20 years and ratings have dropped like a rock demonstrate they do no good.