EightBlack.

I went to a focus group on Monday night. It was for my son’s school.

Now, I’m not a big fan of focus groups. In fact, I think they are about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.

The girl from the research company sounded so serious on the phone though, that I thought I should go.

I also have a sadistic side - in the sense that to make sure you never get invited to one of these gigs again, you make certain they remember what you did or said at the first one.

I was also wanting to talk to someone about what the hell was my son doing playing an online game called “Super Gerball”. No jokes, that’s what it’s called. When I asked him about it, he told me that they play it at school. He thinks it’s funny. In fact, it’s probably called something else, but the kids probably got together one day and said to each other, “hey, let’s wind up our parents, and tell them we play a game named after some freaky thing called a jerball”.

I think I might cancel the broadband at home…

Anyway, focus groups are pointless because they ask you questions in which they already know the answer. In fact, the consultants have in most cases, written the final report to the client before one single interraction takes place.

Now I can’t imagine what the nice company charged my son’s school for this, but it wouldn’t have been cheap.

There were only 7 parents involved - which made me wonder what the other 6,000 odd parents were doing on a Monday night. And then I started to become paranoid about why they singled me out for?

But I was intrigued…so I went.

The questions were predictable. They were fishing for answers. Looking for validation. Being superficial. After all, if the school were really serious about getting to the bottom of their major concerns, they wouldn’t ask 7 parents to come along for all of 1 hour and answer 5 carefully scripted and crafted questions.

They’d ask the whole school population to participate - via online, offline, group discussions, student and parent collaboration. In fact, the whole shooting match.

I think schools today have become a lot like many businesses and the way they market. They play it safe. They don’t stand for anything. They don’t interract or ask enough questions.

My son’s school is now an $80 million dollar a year business. It’s very different to when I went there. And when my old man went there.

I’d be the first to agree that schools need to move with the times and be progressive. But they also need to be better marketers.

Their clients after all, are much much savvier than the parents that preceded them because of one simple thing.

The internet.

We have access to a plethora of information and content. And so do our kids.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 5:32 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.