Every January I always try and catch up with clients on their plans for the year ahead. This time it has been particularly interesting as three clients have already discussed doing less ‘typical’ qual as they are planning to use their communities to cover this type of work (fortunately our sister agency Tuned In can handle these!).

This started me thinking about what the world of qualitative would look like in 3-5 years time. If we assume the qual market is currently 70% groups and that this is the default method for most projects then we can project a very different looking industry in a few years.

I suspect a lot of the quick and dirty qual, checking on ads or disaster checking NPD will be thrown into ongoing communities. Instead of 4 groups costing £12k done over 6 weeks you get similar feedback in 1 week costing £5k. So what do the rest of us quallies do who are not into running communities?

I think the biggest hit will be taken by the big quant agencies whose qual offerings tend to be fairly generic afterthoughts. There could then be a push for budgets to be spend in more interesting deep dive projects (which would please most of us!) with communities covering the need for ongoing dialogue and a way to get quick qual / quant feedback thus minimising spend on more tactical studies.

Anyway, maybe it is wishful thinking, people have been writing the obituary of the focus group for as long as I can remember. But maybe this time it’s different!