Essay Focus Groups

We see advertisement everywhere from left right. Ads are seen on devices and while just driving around. Advertisements are used to get people to purchase a product. Got milk “was an American campaign encouraging the consumption of cow’s milk, which was created by the advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners.” Got milk ads have many inspirational celebrities to model their company. Such as famous singers, dancers, athletes, actors, talk show host, and models. I’m analyzing a got milk ad of Hayden Panettiere from 2007. The ad’s strategy is to show how each celebrity drinks milk. The ad plays an audience towards teens, both boys and girls by offering them to choose a healthy lifestyle. By choosing a healthy lifestyle, teens

Large advertising agencies have evolved pseudo-scientific methods through experience, research and intuition that yield a demographic profile of the target audience, who are the most important predictors of purchasing behavior.

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

Advertisements come in various shapes, sizes, and mediums, and as humans, we are constantly surrounded by them. Whether they are on TV, radio, or in a magazine, there is no way that we can escape them. They all have their target audience for whom the advertisers have specifically designed the ad. When a company produces a commercial, their main objective is to get their product to sell. This is a multibillion-dollar industry and the advertisers study all the ways that they can attract their audience’s attention. The producers of advertisements have many tactics and strategies they use when producing an ad to get consumers to buy their product. These include things such as rhetorical

The Persuaders (2004, directed by Douglass Rushcoff) is a documentary with a hard eye on the multi-billion dollar advertising and marketing industry. They examine the subconscious and psychological techniques behind advertising and marketing developments. The documentary also determines how these new methods of marketing influence us, our desires and our self-image, finally theorizing on the future implications or repercussions of the influential forces that are constantly at work.

People see up to 5,000 commercials a day (Johnson); additionally, a number of individuals feel that these advertisements are simply informative. Actually, they are choked full of fallacies which deviously influence peoples spending. Granted, advertisements are an important element in the business world and a thriving economy because of its information, it is manipulative due to the fact that it distorts a human’s view on a psychological level by embellishing, disregarding the entire truth, and appealing to an individual’s deepest desires.

Focus groups can be an excellent way to collect data and be able to identify if the interventions have an effect on the clients (Stringer, 2007). I’m interested

Flexible and inexpensive, focus groups consist of six to ten participants (Hartman, 2004, p. 408). Additionally, a moderator guides the discussion among its panel members that allows researchers to observe real-time verbal responses and nonverbal cues (Hartman, 2004, p. 402; Cooper & Schindler, 2014, p. 160). Focus groups moderators also have the ability to introduce new ideas to gain a greater understanding of concerns from respondents (Hartman, 2004, p. 402). However, a concern with focus group is the lack of anonymity due to the face-to-face participation.

This article represents a focus group type of qualitative research. According to Qualitative Research Consultants Association (2015), in focus group qualitative research, a group of individuals who share a need, life circumstance, or habit relevant to the research issue(s) at hand are led in a discussion by a modulator. The focus group discussions often include between two to ten respondents, and are often held face to face. They can also be conducted remotely through videoconferencing, teleconferencing, or

Advertising is a staple in the American Free Market Economy: it is used by companies to persuade consumers to purchase certain products, as well as to educate consumers about the benefits of their product. Dozens of varying advertising techniques are used by marketing companies in an attempt to coerce potential buyers into purchasing products. These advertisements come in many forms, in such a quantity that they are now a typical part of American day-to-day life. Advertising is so vital to the prosperity of a company and the promotion of the company’s products that marketers across the United States are spending billions of dollars for the ideal product positioning and consumer exposure to their products. A majority of the consumer demand in

Advertising is a form of communication used to encourage or persuade an audience to continue or take some new action. But when advertisers produce an ad, they have many different variables that come into play if they want to successfully persuade consumers. The first most important step they have to figure out is, what type of audience they are trying to target. They then create images and intend to appeal specifically to the values, hopes, and desires of that particular audience. This is why someone would rather pick the well-known Malboro cowboy ads over the new female cigarettes of Virginia Slims. Each of these ads targets a specific audience;

This media research method has been used previously, since the year 1993. According to the Hardwick Research, focus groups were first used in the U.S, for media research on war propaganda at Princeton University, during the World War II (Hardwick, 2014). The objective was to aid the U.S government to understand the most effective messages that would influence support for the war. Today, focus groups are depended on by researchers who aim to understand the emotions, behaviours and knowledge of selected participants. To add on that, Litosseliti (2003) acknowledges the fact that the dynamism of technology has been able to improve and enrich how data can be collected from a focus group. There are various developments, for example, projections, which uncover participants’ hidden attitudes (Hardwick, 2014).

Carson et al (2001, p.114) refers to focus groups as “A research technique that collects data through group interaction on a topic or topics”. They also suggest that the central distinctive characteristic of focus groups is group interaction, which generates a mass of data, which would be

Members of the public from a company’s target group or audience are chosen to express their views about the advertisment before it is published or aired. Media can include television, cinema and radio. This is the communications aspect of

First is focus group method, focus group is defined as a group of individuals providing information in a structured format. A moderator leads the group of about 8 to 14 participants through an open, in-depth discussion rather than simply asking questions to solicit participants’ responses. The group is stimulated by comments from other group members in creatively conceptualizing and developing a new