For Focus Groups, There is a Magic Number. It’s 13.

22 May For Focus Groups, There is a Magic Number. It’s 13.

Quality vs. Quantity?

It’s the #1 question we get asked. The age-old question of quantity vs. quality. And for most things, the answer is simple:

You want fewer, better quality leads for your sales team.

You want fewer, better quality friends in your life.

And you want fewer, better quality respondents for your dial group.

Quality trumps quantity. In fact, having more respondents is often LESS effective.

Is There a Sweet Spot?

Yes. We’ve found that there’s a sweet spot for garnering the best, and most useful, information for your research dollars.

If you’re familiar with the dial-testing, it’s a research method that register respondents’ agreement/disagreement with your message. We rely on this technology as one of the tools in our bag of tricks. If there are too many people in a group, the lines don’t register many spikes and dips. The quantity tends to moderate the amplitude of the peaks and valleys . This makes it harder to know what segments to isolate for discussion. With too few in a group, very turn of the dial registers as a spike or a dip making it difficult to discern what really matters.

And once we begin the follow-up conversation, if the group is too large, some people won’t get a chance to share their feedback.  Too few people and there’s not enough potential for diversity of opinion.

So….What’s the Magic Number?

The optimal number for a dial-test focus group is about 10-12. Our best advice: Recruit 13 respondents. That is your sweet spot. It’s that simple.

A Note About Quality

Speaking of recruiting, the quality of respondents is, obviously, incredibly important. We work with you to determine the kind of respondent you want in each session, and we develop screening questionnaires for the recruiters.

These questions could include income levels, education, and political outlook.

You might set quotas for gender, age, or ethnicity.

You might want a particular something, and you might want to exclude something else.

Maybe you want experts in a field; or maybe you’d rather have people who have a more superficial knowledge of the topic.

We’ll help you discern what kind of respondents will get you the information you need. That’s our specialty.

If you have an upcoming need for message testing and simply want to brainstorm some approaches, please reach out to us: Email or Contact Us.