Just arrived at the Columbia Faculty House for Corante's Marketing Innovation Conference (note to self: never walk from 116th Street Subway to Faculty House again...it's too far and I'm too lazy)
Right now, listening to a panel on Models for Innovation. One comment which really resonated was about talking to consumers with respect to marketing/innovation. The point was to find the right consumers to talk to...i.e. "innovative" consumers versus the rest/non-innovative customers.
This has strong implications with respect to focus groups.
Think about it for a moment. We pull "typical" consumers into a room. Average Joes. People that represent the mass. But it isn't the mass or "median consumer" that ultimately will be responsible for our success...it's the innovators/innovative ones; the opinion leaders etc.
Those are the consumers we need to be talking to (and obviously not behind a one way mirror either); the ones that are leaders and the ones who are able (as best as possible) to articulate and comprehend the abstract and conceptual.
That said, I often say that if you want to get the right answers, you need to ask the right questions. Think about "articulated needs" versus "unarticulated solutions" - consumers don't know what they don't know (that's a given); the problem is that we (the marketers) are stuck between a rock and a hard place with respect to darting backward and forwards between two extremes: marketer as King (as in "we know better" or "we'll only hear what we want to hear") and consumer as King (as in giving the consumer too much latitude and leverage)
