Focus Group Questionnaire

In the world of marketing, focus groups are seen as an important tool for acquiring feedback regarding new products, as well as various topics regarding things currently on the market. In particular, focus groups allow companies wishing to develop, package, name, or test market a new product, to discuss, view, and/or test the new product before it is made available to the public. This can provide invaluable information about the potential market acceptance of the product.

Benefits of a Focus Group:
- The researcher can interact with the participants, pose follow-up questions or ask questions that probe more deeply.
- The results which you gain can be easier to understand than complicated statistical data.
- The researcher can get information from non-verbal responses, such as facial expressions or body language.
- Information is provided more quickly than if people were interviewed separately as can be done in a large group etc.­

Limitations of a Focus Group:
- The small sample size means the groups might not be a good representation of the larger population.
- Group discussions can be difficult to steer and control, so time can be lost to irrelevant topics.
- Respondents can feel peer pressure to give similar answers to the moderator's questions.
- The moderator's skill in phrasing questions along with the setting can affect responses and skew results.

The group which I am targeting my newspaper is to people in there teenage years right up to people getting into their sixty’s. By targeting a large amount of people I will be able to create a newspaper which will hopefully sell more as more people will buy it due it including things a lot of people like.

I have created a questionnaire which I am going to ask people in my focus group so that I can determine what sort of contents they like to see in newspapers. By asking these people I will be able to ask the people who will be reading the newspaper and their opinions will matter most. Traditional focus groups can provide accurate information, and are less expensive than other forms of traditional marketing research. Some other marketing research is very cost effective and very time consuming, this type of research is quick, cheap and much easier and will give me the information that I need.

I asked the same amount of people this questionnaire on my focus group as I did with my general questionnaire on newspapers. I thought that thirty was a reasonable amount of people to ask and that I would get excellent feedback and get much better opinions by asking a larger amount of people. The questionnaire which I created can be seen below:

General Question for my Focus Group
1. Do you think that I should post my papers through the door free of charge?
Yes No

2. Do you think that I should sell some of the papers in local shops for 30p; do you think this is a fair price?
Yes No

3. Do you think it is reasonable to offer you this service on a weekly basis, one newspaper per week?
Yes No

4. Do you like to have a variety of pictures on the newspapers when reading them, relating to the articles?
Yes No

5. Would you like the newspaper to be colour-full or plain?
Colour-full Plain

6. Do you think that it is a good idea to have the main article in the newspaper about sport?
Yes No

7. Would you like general articles to be included as well as the sport article?
Yes No

8. Would you like advertisements to be included in the newspaper?
Yes No