76 Words That Work

will be addressed that night. One dirty little secret of focus groups is the
necessity of recruiting more people than can participate in a session. It’s
amazing what people will say they are or pretend to be for the opportu-
nity of earning $100 for a two-hour session or $150 for three hours.
About 10 percent of would-be focus group participants will lie on the
phone, claiming to be something they are not or to believe something
they don’t, and another 10 percent don’t show up despite confirming
their participation twice. I have one client, a large national retail chain,
where the no-show rate for their employee focus groups consistently
reaches 40 percent—and occasionally more.
The pre-screener asks about fifteen questions and is designed to un-
cover and weed out those who for whatever reason do not belong in the
session. But even that process doesn’t always work. I once had a woman
show up who claimed to watch network news programs on a daily basis,
and said so in her screener, but she did not know who Tom Brokaw was
and couldn’t identify him even when watching a tape of him delivering
the news. She was escorted out of the session, but it surely lowered my
credibility with my client, the senior NBC executives watching from be-
hind the mirror.
The most common focus group consists of about a dozen people sit-
ting around a long rectangular table in a room about the size of most
people’s dens.* Nondescript artwork adorns three of the four plain walls
if you’re lucky, but the fourth wall is a one-way mirror that allows partic-
ipants to check their hair, repeatedly, while allowing observers in a back
room to watch the proceedings undetected—most of the time.
While the participants are doing most of the work in front of the mir-
ror, the real action is happening in the dimly lit back room. The actual
focus group participants are treated to a generic deli tray of barely edible
sandwiches and stale potato chips—and only if they arrive early enough.
But in the back room, the food never stops. Applying the theory that a
hungry client is an angry client, back room observers often dine on
sushi, fine wine, and gourmet spreads that rival any banquet hall or wed-
ding reception. And thanks to an endless supply of M&M’s, miniature

*Not all focus groups are conducted in formal settings. I once moderated an impromptu session
on board an America West flight. The topic, not coincidentally, was airline satisfaction. The client,
however, was Continental—and the America West crew did not take kindly to a discussion of an-
other airline. Despite protests from the passengers, I was ordered to my seat for the remainder of
the flight. In Las Vegas in 2002, to test the promos for the NBC fall line-up, I involved an entire
section of the Grand Lux Cafe, a restaurant in the Venetian Hotel, in a discussion of Katie Couric.
Management again prematurely shut it down.