Surveys are great for determining what your customers like or think is important. Focus groups are among best ways to uncover why they feel the way they do. Structured but open-ended discussions probe your customer's thoughts and feelings in depth. When you know the context behind their attitudes and behavior, you can speak to your target audience in their own language, responding perfectly to their expectations and avoiding costly missteps.

At Reactions & Opinions Inc., we offer traditional focus groups, telephone focus groups and our patented TurboFocus Groups. The rated discussion, or TurboFocus Group, is an enormously powerful hybrid of qualitative and quantitative methods, melding the rich insights of focus groups with the statistical reliability of survey research. Only Reactions & Opinions Inc. offers it.

Whatever approach you choose, our seasoned moderators are highly skilled at eliciting detailed insights from participants in their own words.

Traditional Focus Groups
Telephone Focus Groups
TurboFocus Groups

Traditional Focus Groups


Many of our clients find our other focus group methods more productive and cost-effective in reaching their constituencies. Yet, sometimes sitting down at a conference table with your target audience is still the best approach. Traditional focus groups work well when the people you need to understand have already gathered for another purpose:

• Employees
• Visitors to a shopping mall, movie theater, tourist attraction, or other public venue
• Students and teachers
• Voters at town meetings and polling locations
• Conference attendees

Telephone Focus Groups


Telephone focus groups are a highly productive and cost-effective means of reaching out to consumers and B2B customers for deeper understanding. This method offers a number of advantages over traditional focus groups. Telephone discussions are:

• Faster, delivering results in less than half the time of traditional focus groups
• More representative, allowing for wide geographic dispersal
• More targeted, providing insights into low incidence populations
• Less expensive, eliminating facility rental, hosting, and travel costs
• More convenient, eliminating travel time, and allowing you to monitor discussion from the comfort of your own office or even from home
• More candid, without many of the social constraints in traditional, face-to-face groups
• Easier to control, minimizing the risk of one dominant, persuasive individual "highjacking" the group dynamics

• Listen in on the discussion and talk privately without being overheard
• Pass virtual notes to the moderator to pursue an idea or change the direction of the discussion
• Debrief with the moderator by phone immediately following the session

TurboFocus Groups

Traditional and telephone focus groups are a valuable way to peek inside the hearts and minds of consumers, but they have a serious limitation. In such small groups, the margin of error is essentially infinite. Researchers and their clients must rely on experience and instinct to judge which competing explanations and opinions matter most. Representative opinions can be triangulated, in part, by conducting more than one group, but multiple sessions quickly become prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

At Reactions & Opinions Inc., we think research should never be about guessing. Years ago, we came up with a better way.

Our TurboFocus Group is a patented research method. This approach develops much deeper insights from focus group opinions by gathering feedback from large samples - just like survey research. Using ROI's patented, online netSlider™, participants rate their moment-by-moment agreement with the opinions expressed. TurboFocus Groups can be conducted online, gathering participants from across the country. They can also be carried out as electronic "town meetings" in fixed facilities. To learn more about how TurboFocus Groups work, click here.
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