Conducting a focus group - HEC Junior Conseil

The focus group: what added value for your business?

Focus groups are often misunderstood by the general public, but their use can be extremely useful when launching a new offer, or improving an existing one. HEC Junior Conseil is used to organizing focus groups for large CAC 40 groups as well as for smaller companies and start-ups.

Focus groups are a meeting that ideally brings together between 8 and 10 people, at the heart of your target, they represent the typical clients of your company. The focus group allows you to to bring out ideas or validate the ones you have.

This is a discussion moderated either by the project managers, or by a paid outside speaker (preferably a psychosociologist), who will ask consumers questions and bounce off their descriptions.

In the course of this discussion, for example, we try to understand which words are most evocative. evocative for your customers, in order to understand exactly what expectations they have of your company. The aim of this focus group is to use the consumer's own words, to make sure that they are reflected in the products they buy. This enables you to refine your marketing strategy or modify your offer in line with customer expectations. Compared with quantitative or qualitative research, the focus group has the advantage of giving consumers a much freer voice, enabling us to understand what they think spontaneously and how to appeal to them. After the focus groups, HEC Junior Conseil will provide you with a summary containing our strategic recommendations based on our observations of the group sessions.

For example, HEC Junior Conseil organised two focus groups for SNCF Mobilités to find out how the Intercités business could adapt to the rise in competition (carpooling, buses, etc.) in order to win over new customers and retain current users.