Focus group politics

Posted 12 June 2007 23:04 by Kristof Michiels

Elections in Belgium last week-end, with the left-wing party in the camp of losers. To my regret I must confess. Today my newspaper reported that the party will use focus groups to get a clearer view of what exactly caused the defeat.

Can I make a small suggestion? Perhaps people didn't like the proposed recipes exactly because of the fact that politics these days have the words marketing and market research written all over them. It often seems as if positions are taken only after a politician is convinced that they will be profitable in the voting booth. As a result many difficult but necessary decisions are postponed or simply not taken at all.

If you continuously fall back on stuff like focus groups your ideas and programmes will also be boring, mediocre, interchangeable and perfectly forgettable. Great ideas (including political ideas) are often controversial, need time and debate, and will NEVER happen in focus groups.

Mind you, I see the value of focus group research (in some, not all cases). It would be nice however to see politicians sticking out their neck again; to see politicians who are willing to take the risk of fighting for the ideas they believe in, without the preliminary backup support of user research. Which, as the elections have shown, does not always turn out reliable.

PS: the illustration provided here, adequately titled Taste test, is by the remarkable Brooklyn street artist Elbow-toe. From the Consumer Education Series, and photographed by guy_on_the_streets.