Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation by Liza Featherstone

Author:Liza Featherstone [Featherstone, Liza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

President Ford flinching at the sound of gunfire during an assassination attempt by Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco, September 22, 1975. Focus groups rejected a similar image for an ad campaign, letting consultants know that voters were still raw from the JFK assassination and not ready for presidential vulnerability. Provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. Public domain.

Political crisis consulting is exciting because the outcomes matter. Tuck explains,

When there’s very important live-or-die, win-or-lose decisions to be made, that’s when strategy matters more, and that’s where strategic research matters more. So what you can learn out of two, four, six, eight focus groups is extraordinarily important, and you waste no time. Everything’s crucial. Every reaction, every raised eyebrow.

Every time anybody pushes back from the table, you want to understand that because it’s going to affect whether you win or lose, whether your candidate gets an extra ten thousand votes . . . or loses those ten thousand votes.

Sometimes a pushback from the table is just a pushback from the table. But you want to find out, you want to ask. So if you’re a good moderator you’ll actually say, “Hey George. I noticed you just leaned away from the table. Did you have a big meal or is it something that Randy just said?” . . . Does he seem pissed off? Does he seem like he’s been insulted? Does he seem like he’s pulling out of the group and doesn’t really want to be a part of it anymore because he thinks, “I don’t want to get in a fight because these aren’t my people” . . . And that stuff always comes up really clearly when you’re doing politics.413

In the early twentieth century, when polling first began to occupy a central place in American political culture, public opinion researcher Paul Cherington celebrated his industry’s potential to give the “vox populi” a “voice” and “restore effective democracy.” 414

Advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins wrote in 1927, long before the focus group, that growing up in poverty helped his career and fueled his enthusiasm for market research:

I do know the common people. I love to talk to laboring men, to study housewives who must count their pennies, to gain the confidence and learn the ambitions of poor boys and girls . . . My words may be simple, my sentences short. Scholars may ridicule my style. The rich may laugh . . . but in many humble households the common people will read and buy. They will feel the writer knows them. And they, in advertising, form 95 percent of our customers.415

This understanding of market research as a populist and democratic project persisted. As the tools for selling consumer goods became more embedded in the political system, we see more language extolling techniques like focus groups as bringing more democracy to the consumer markeplace: CEOs, the men of Sawyer Miller liked to say, were “up for election every single day.”417 The marketing world had convinced

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