The Focus Group: A Strategic Guide to Organizing, Conducting and Analyzing the Focus Group Interview

Rating:
Summary: Expert advice, unfortunately not for beginners
Review: Faley Templeton seems to know a lot about focus groups but i think she could have spent more time on structuring her book. She talks a lot about her daily experience and her personal opinion on testing aspects. As a novice to this subject I expected a kick-start on how to conduct focus groups - with more facts and basics. This seems to be a book for experts who want to get some additional insight from another expert.

Rating:
Summary: Practical Jewels
Review: For anyone who works in creating strategies on securing better ways to create customer value, researching what customers think is a mandatory part of the process.

This book has two levels - the high level teaches you how to run and analyse a focus group approach to securing this information.

For the more experienced, there are the jewels of her experience in things that can be done better or those little insights that enable us to find the diamond inside tons of carbon like ideas.

I have re-read this book many times and have always found something extra that I had missed on the previous occasion.

For anyone doing post-graduate research through people and interviews, this book is mandatory.

For anyone in business, this book allows you to challenge the research guru class that can (if you let them) take you in directions that are not always the best ones to travel.

Worth the investment.

Rating:
Summary: So-so
Review: I would not recommend buying this book. The information covered in it is also covered in other books, but this one is exceptionally long-winded. On top of that, there is a plethora of typographical errors (which drive me absolutely nuts in a published, hardcopy book).

Rating:
Summary: inaccessible thesis-style writing...
Review: i'm annoyed with myself for buying it because this is totally not what i was hoping for. i needed a book that matches this book's byline "A Strategic Guide to Organizing..." and in my mind it doesn't live up to that. This book definitely needs to have a "warning: experts only" or "warning: academics only" the way that computer books do. then i could have bought the introductory book that i needed instead of this piece of work that reads like something aimed at a college professor instead of a working professional.

Rating:
Summary: So-so
Review: i'm annoyed with myself for buying it because this is totally not what i was hoping for. i needed a book that matches this book's byline "A Strategic Guide to Organizing..." and in my mind it doesn't live up to that. This book definitely needs to have a "warning: experts only" or "warning: academics only" the way that computer books do. then i could have bought the introductory book that i needed instead of this piece of work that reads like something aimed at a college professor instead of a working professional.

the frustrating part here is that there *is* good information in here, it just takes 4 times longer to extract it and digest it than you can with a book that's utilizes plain lanuguage, better typesetting and layout, and some degree of user-friendliness. to make an analogy: i needed the "Mac" version of this information and what i bought was the commandline unix version.