Qualitative or quantitative?

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Companies often test their new product prototypes with focus groups. These can be useful for gathering consumer reactions to particular features of products or specific details of the way the product concept is worked out, especially if the research is managed by a highly professional marketing research company.

Since the thing you want most from market research is an accurate reflection of the opinion of your target market, the validity of the opinions you get (are they measuring what you hope they're measuring?) and their reliability (will these customers say the same thing next week?) are central concerns. Several facts of life can stand in the way of getting valid and reliable (accurate) results from focus groups. Three of these are discussed below.

Sometimes participants make a "career" of giving their advice, motivated by lucrative participation stipends. This can weaken the reliability and validity of the results of the market research.
Even in the more usual circumstances, where panels are genuinely interested in the product, and willing to share their opinions, focus groups can fail to give true insights into what the consumer really thinks because some panel members may have problems in articulating their true thoughts about what they like or don't like about the product.
There can be other problems created by participants who take more than their fair share of "air time" or out of politeness try to tell the moderators "what they want to hear."

Using the Creative Product Semantic Scale can give you a new tool that has been developed, tested, and validated in numerous studies and varied settings over two decades to give reliable insights about what your customers think. The CPSS taps customers' real opinions because users simply indicate the degree to which the product reflects the qualities shown on the assessment. Results of the surveys present customer opinion in easily understood bar graphs that show how well the product stacks up against other alternatives.