Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation

by Liza Featherstone

Overview

Over the course of the last century, the focus group has become an increasingly vital part of the way companies and politicians sell their products and policies. Few areas of life, from salad dressing to health care legislation to our favorite TV shows, have been left untouched by the questions put to controlled groups about what they do and don’t like. Divining Desire is the first-ever popular survey of this rich topic.

In a lively, sweeping history, Liza Featherstone traces the surprising roots of the focus group in early-twentieth century European socialism, its subsequent use by the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue, and its widespread deployment today. She also explores such famous “failures” of the method as the doomed launch of the Ford Edsel with its vagina shaped radiator grille, and the even more ill-fated attempt to introduce a new flavor of Coca Cola (which prompted street protests from devotees of the old formula).

As elites have become increasingly detached from the general public, they rely ever more on focus groups, whether to win votes or to sell products. And, in a society where many feel increasingly powerless, the focus group has at least offered the illusion that ordinary people will be listened to and that their opinions count. Yet, it seems the more we are consulted, the less power we have. That paradox is particularly stark today, when everyone can post an opinion on social media—our 24 hour “focus group”—yet only plutocrats can shape policy.

In telling this fascinating story, Featherstone raises profound questions about democracy, desire and the innermost workings of consumer society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781682195093
Publisher:	OR Books
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York City and a contributing editor to The Nation, where she also writes the advice column “Asking for a Friend.” Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Ms., and Rolling Stone among many other outlets. She is the co-author of Students against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (Verso, 2002) and author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic, 2004). She is the editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton (Verso, 2016).

Read an Excerpt

Preface: ”How Would You Imagine That?”

“It’s hard but it’s worth it, I think.” She says, reassuring herself, but not sounding entirely sure, “It is.” Michelle, a soft-spoken young mother of two, is speaking about balancing childcare, housework, and a full-time job outside the home.

Sharon, a stay-at-home mom, says her interests are “trying to figure out how to be stress-free, being at home with the kids.”

Teresa calls herself as a stay-at-home mom, too, although she actually works part-time as a waitress. She heartily seconds Sharon’s emphasis on stress: “I just can’t wait till bedtime.”

The women, all mothers of young children, are introducing themselves to one another, and describing the difficulties of balancing work and parenthood, time pressures, and many other shared problems. Though the problems are contemporary, the conversation evokes a bygone era.

But we’re not eavesdropping on a 1970s-style feminist consciousness-raising group, with its fusion of therapy and empowerment. Nor is this a political group organizing for universal day care or pay equity. It’s a focus group whose aim is to explore consumer reaction to a new product whose target market is mothers of babies.

The mothers describe time pressure, and the burden of “husbands who don’t really want to do stuff.” Not a single woman fails to be animated by the conversation or the product; everyone is engaged. Some would consider the women’s discussion a political one, engaging, as it does, problems of work-family balance and gender equality within marriage. Yet their conversation offers a window on how such concerns, and the pleasure people take in discussing them, can be so helpful to corporate America.

“How would you imagine that?” the moderator asks constantly, inviting the women to think creatively about how the product might best transform their lives.

One woman brings one word of hope to the discussion of how the product might make her feel: “Relief.”

The conversation gets into intimate child-rearing detail. The women’s graphic descriptions of poop “blowouts” at the shopping mall, or on an airplane, would resonate with any parent. Others describe less-dramatic crises. “She goes like this after every meal,” one mom imitates her toddler, putting her hands in her hair. “I need to give her a bath but there’s not always time for that.”

“What do you do now in these situations?” asks the moderator, a warm and deeply attentive listener, who never assumes she knows what they’re thinking.

No bath, was the consensus.

If the baby doesn’t get a bath: “Then you feel really guilty,” one mom explains, to murmurs of agreement. “Because you’re a terrible mother.”

“When would you see using something like this?” the moderator asks them, about the product. Not surprisingly, given the magic powers they’ve already bestowed upon it, one woman says quickly, “As soon as possible.”

When they test the product, however, the moms don’t love it as much as they loved the idea. They complain about the texture. It’s not obvious how best to use it.

The moms are overworked—inside and outside the home. When the focus group explores their own lives, it does sound like a feminist consciousness-raising group. But because it’s run by a consumer goods company rather than by radical feminists, the solutions that emerge are commercial and not political.

The women in this group are doing some quasi-political things. They are looking critically at their lives, forming community—even if only for a few hours—and cooperating. They are talking and listening, building on each other’s ideas. The focus group taps into some of what we as social human beings do best. The focus group can also engage people at a profound level, tapping into deep desires, conflicts, and even new ideas. It harnesses our collective impulses to share, discuss, and work together. The focus group also allows us to cooperate with others, which in our rather lonely, individualistic culture, we don’t often get to do.

No product can solve all these women’s problems, of course. But the conversation took place for good reason. The company convened the focus group because, no doubt, the corporate executives who run the company genuinely don’t know how ordinary moms live. In order to sell things, they need to do some listening.

The focus group has been one of their favorite ways of listening for a long time.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface: "How Would You Imagine That?"
Introduction: Dichter's Egg
Chapter One: The Birth of the Focus Group
Chapter Two: "The Snowball Interview": The Focus Group Comes to Madison Avenue
Chapter Three: "King Consumer": Market Research is Attacked... and Industry Responds
Chapter Four: Viper, Fool, or Expert? The Consumer as a Woman
Chapter Five: "We Ask Them": Focus Groups in the Age of Women's Liberation
Chapter Six: Entertaining Joe Sixpack
Chapter Seven: "Where is the Emotion?" The Emergence of the Focus Group in Politics
Chapter Eight: "God and Coca-Cola": The Story of New Coke
Chapter Nine: "A Faster Horse?" The Entrepreneur Strikes Back
Chapter Ten: "The Decider"
Chapter Eleven: Bartender in a Lamborghini: The Professional Respondent
Chapter Twelve: "Who Are These Appalling People?"
Conclusion: Are Focus Groups Dead?
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Divining Desire

"When did the vox populi become just another way to fatten the elite? In this vividly written history of the focus group, Liza Featherstone tells us how consumer capitalism found its pseudo-liberating groove. By pretending to listen, big business pretends to empower." —Tom Frank, author, What's the Matter With Kansas?

"With sharp analysis and on-the-ground reporting, Liza Featherstone exposes the secret life of focus groups. She shows in fascinating detail just how corporations and politicians create a false sense of populism, as they scramble to gather bits of wisdom from Everywoman—in order to better sell her a can of soup or a candidate. If you want to learn how consumerism—and the politics of consumerism—really work, Divining Desire is the book to read." —Leslie Savan, author, The Sponsored Life: Ads, TV and American Culture.

"The focus group has been a staple of the American consumer and political landscape for well more than a half-century, yet few know its history, ubiquity, and limitations. Liza Featherstone has filled in the knowledge gap with this brilliantly conceived and elegantly written book. Divining Desire is essential for anyone trying to understand how business and political elites connect with their desired audience—or fail to." —James Ledbetter, editor of Inc. magazine, and author of One Nation under Gold: How One Precious Metal Has Dominated the American Imagination for Four Centuries

"We are increasingly living in a world obsessed with soliciting and expressing opinions—whether on social media, in market surveys, or surrounding presidential elections. In her wonderful book, Liza Featherstone helps us penetrate this 'culture of consultation' - and recognize that actually we are living in a culture of cooptation where weighing in is more of an illusion than a reality, one that helps legitimize the power of elites." —Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

"Divining Desire is a brilliant and insightful work of history, reportage and social criticism. In this deeply researched, slyly funny book, Featherstone takes us "behind the mirror" to show us how the economic ritual of the focus group reflects our deepest, most secret political longings: not for better consumer products, but for a deeper role in our democracy. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of capitalism, economic life and social change." —Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

"Divining Desire infiltrates and skillfully analyzes one of the most under-scrutinized elements of our modern machinery of influence: the focus group. With origins in academia, this shortcut to understanding affects our views on consumer culture, class, social categories, politics, and policy. Liza Featherstone's definitive take on the subject will change the way you think about what other people (supposedly) think." —Rob Walker, author, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are

"Featherstone's uncynical history of public opinion research is a treasury of information and analysis. Where others only see spin, she tracks the deep neediness of elites, who know so little about those they seek to please and manipulate and dominate." —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

"For anyone interested in the modern manipulation of the masses, Divining Desire is a must read. Liza Featherstone makes a convincing case for how focus groups have warped the democratic impulse to create politics and products that are more responsive to the people, into a marketing system designed to make people respond favorably to what has already been created for them. Through historical research, participant observation, and interviews with industry professionals, Featherstone takes us on an erudite and engaging tour of focus groups, from their early use by Viennese socialists and anti-Nazi propagandists, to mid-century marketers selling cake mix to guilty housewives, to contemporary political elites passing policies that largely benefit the 1% by understanding everyday voters' desires and frustrations. Divining Desire is, quite simply, the best book in print on the history and politics of the "culture of consultation." —Stephen Duncombe, Professor of Media and Culture, New York Universityand author of Dream: Reimagining Radical Politics in an Age of Fantasy

"Fake input came long before fake news, and fake input is just as dangerous. The more people let the new Wall Street, Silicon Valley, pretend to offer input, the less real power there is for ordinary people. This book contributes a critical understanding of how frames and narrative have become a shallow and grossly ineffective tool that reinforces, not challenges, the economic and polite elite. Google, Facebook and Silicon Valley are strategically turning the world into one big focus group." —Jane McAlevey, author, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

From the Publisher

2017-11-20
In war and its commercial counterpart, we have long lived inside a "culture of consultation." So writes Nation contributing editor Featherstone (Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker's Rights at Wal-Mart, 2004, etc.) in this intriguing look at the rise of the focus group.Focus groups, writes the author, afford "ordinary people" a chance to weigh in on all kinds of things, whether to gauge whether the president is doing a good job or a mix is easy enough to turn into a cake. Around the focus group evolved a parallel culture of social science-based "motivational research" firms, working the angles in an increasingly consumerist society, using advanced technology of the sort that we now see when the responses of focus groups are measured live on TV. Focus groups bent on persuading citizens to enter World War II revealed that the way to sell it was not to depict the Nazis as "horrible monsters," which frightened citizens into wanting nothing to do with the war effort; instead, writes Featherstone, "American propaganda would emphasize our superior values: democracy and rationality." After the war, psychologists and other social scientists used abstract methods to "acclimate patients to consumer capitalism," shaping advertising to reflect the desire of consumers to buy endlessly. Along the way, Featherstone disassembles some misconceptions—the Edsel car, for instance, was not a failure because it relied too much on focus groups but perhaps because it made too little use of them (focus-group members, for example, expressed dislike for the very name, saying that it sounded too much like "weasel"). Nefarious use of the focus group continues, even though supposedly displaced by the internet, especially in political matters, about which the author observes, "when a focus group feels more like democracy than the real thing, we need to ask how well the real thing is functioning."A spirited critique of what Russell Jacoby has called the "culture of endless talk," of a piece with Jackson Lears' Fables of Abundance (1995) and Rachel Maines' Hedonizing Technologies (2009).

Kirkus Reviews