They decide which ad campaigns will be seen and which will be scrapped. They decide what products will enter the American marketplace and what those products will be called and how they'll be packaged. They are convened to serve as mock juries in pretrial mock trials. No issue is too important for focus groups and no issue is too trivial. More often they discuss foot odor or Donald Duck bedsheets or the menu at Bob's Big Boy or ads for Canadian Club. Sometimes, focus groups focus on the great issues of our time - abortion and feminism and race relations and national health care. Now, focus groups are convened daily all across the country by the great alphabet soup of American institutions - ABC and AT&T and C&P and MCI and EPA and the IRS and the GAO and the AFL-CIO and the AARP and even the CIA. Madison Avenue adopted the technique after the war, but it has really taken off in the last decade. They are paid to sit in a little room and drink coffee and nibble snacks and talk about something - pretzels or pantyhose or presidential candidates - while researchers hidden behind a one-way mirror watch closely and take notes and pay heed.įocus groups were born in World War II, when the military wanted to learn which morale-boosting movies actually boosted GIs' morale. I'm talking, of course, about focus groups.įocus groups are gatherings of eight to 12 humans who have been demographically selected by age and sex and income and other qualities, such as whether they use hair spray or own parakeets or eat Chee-tos.
Their power is awesome but mysterious, impossible to measure. Political leaders and captains of industry don't dare to make a move without consulting them. Their every word, every gesture, is videotaped, studied, scrutinized by experts who write reports analyzing their every nuance. They sit around a conference table and talk. They meet in secret and do not reveal their names. They chose the theme for the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow ("A brighter future and a safer world for all people") and they demanded relief from the horror and the heartbreak of "Dorito breath." They okayed colored bikini underwear for men. They decided to remove the red bandanna from Aunt Jemima's head. They nixed the dollar coin but gave the go-ahead for genetically engineered tomatoes. They were responsible for the change in Bill Clinton's hairdo during the 1992 campaign and for the appearance of Willie Horton in the 1988 race. They determine what songs will be heard on the radio, what shows will be seen on TV. They decide what colors M&M's will come in. They meet in secret and determine the future of just about everything.
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