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Thursday, 10:51 pm, 24 June 2004 Tesco Online Focus Group My wife was sick last week and from bed volunteered us to attend a Tesco Online focus group. Tesco is a British supermarket chain and we use their online service for probably 3/4 of our total shopping now. Although it has taken about a year for us to work towards that. I am a big fan of online groceries and it is something my wife does pretty solely. Since we got together my wife doesn't really let me cook all that much. I used to cook a great deal as a bachelor and my mother commented it was one of my best features - my cooking. But my wife likes traditional faire and there isn't much traditional about my fusion cooking. The focus group started and all the parties were introduced except the audience. Really we were there as an audience rather than contributors. There were probably about twenty of us and within five minutes the aggressive few in the audience began directing the tone. My wife and I never go out together. In fact, I couldn't think of a social setting my wife and I have ever attended together bar our wedding. We rarely are around other people together and thus I guess we are very different people. My heart rate began to increase when they stopped the question time having only spoken to a quarter of the audience. A junior member of the team presenting began on the web interface talk. He started by saying that the regular guy who gave the presentation was watching the England football match. It seemed like he was being directed. In fact, sitting next to my wife and one row down, there were obviously senior manager types prompting the presentation from the sidelines. The fellow giving the presentation was not able to compete. It seemed that the local staff from Tesco were put there to present the company side and in part, to belittle those aggressive few in the audience. At the end of the presentation and after the last question was allowed my wife raised her hand and asked her question about brand availability. I wasn't able to ask my question. At the end, the Tesco woman sitting in our row came up to us and I asked my question about whether our ordering patterns were shared with other companies. Really this wasn't the 'My eggs have been smashed four times'/'Why can't you deliver when I want' questions that had been coming from the floor. My next question, directly to the Tesco woman was about internet advertising and why Tesco had any ads on their ordering site. It isn't a free service and there is a tendency to put ads on white space on the internet with the perception that white space needs filling. I made the point that bandwidth wasn't a commodity that should be sold if we are paying for the service. I asked if there was an advertising strategy. She said basically there wasn't. They tried ads. They wouldn't increase the ads but they tried to sell the space to advertisers that were sympathetic to the demographic. She asked if I/we worked in the industry and my wife answered 'No!' somewhat dismissively. I suspect my wife wanted to cut the informal discussion short so we could leave. My final point was that I thought the focus group had failed in the most part because the group hadn't been subdivided. Although I understood the need for us to have local staff to observe the group, I couldn't understand why we couldn't have broken down into smaller groups and gotten feedback from the managers circulating the group. The response was that Tesco used a number of groups methods and the more refined focus group was one of these. Deconstructing the Experience As we left, my wife pointed out she was uncomfortable with the focused and somewhat emotionless nature of my questions at the end. Although I was only asking them of one person, who turned out to be the Tesco Online manager, my questions made my wife feel uncomfortable. Driving home my wife and I dissected the experience. The first thing we agreed upon was the nature of the quarter of the group that got their points across and the fact that there is clearly a complaint culture in the UK which doesn't directly reflect in service. In fact, although a lot of the services I use are quite left of centre -miniature painting for example - the general level of service is very poor. Even Fred Reed isn't the best correspondent and will tend to group large lots, much to my frustration. I am a small package pedestrian. Not a 12kg of miniatures in two large bags. But I maintain a really high level of service in everything I am responsible for. My eBay sales, for example, I take real pride in. Personally, I don't have a particularly high service expectation but I reward good service. Tesco Online, in general, is a good service. My wife and I diverged on my questions at the end. My wife didn't see there was much point in satirising the focus group, as she put it. This level of deconstruction she didn't think was appropriate. I said I thought she hadn't really let me make my points and had cut me off. Although, I understood after two hours of hearing from people who got 5kg of potatoes instead of 5 potatoes... one did want to escape. My final thought was about my wife's perception of me vs my perception of me. I think we both have a good idea of what my wife does and who she is. But there seems to be some divergence about the perception of Tom. This is a personal narrative thing. Perhaps there are many Toms but fewer versions of my wife. I certainly feel I am one person at work, one at home and through some perversion also a different person online - through my work online and through these long log entries. Perhaps this is what I got from American Splendor. That one can live a life of meaningless existence and create something of meaning. I said to my wife, I thought we should do more things together as a couple with other people. All we do together, we do alone. For our life in the UK of the past three years, it has been difficult to make friends. My wife has done better than I have. But still the people she has made friends with are through her work. I, on the other hand, have all my friendships online. This has been my life in the UK. Making new friends online. This is the Regulars page. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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