The Focus Group: Mister Squishy

The Focus Group was then reconvened in another of Reesemeyer

Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms. Each

member returned his Individual Response Profile packets to the facilitator,

who thanked each in turn.The long conference table was equipped

with leather executive swivel chairs; there was no assigned seating.

Bottled spring water and caffeinated beverages were made available to

those who thought they might want them. The exterior wall of the

conference room was a thick tinted window with a broad high-altitude

view of points NE, creating a spacious, attractive, and more or less

natural-lit environment that was welcome after the bland fluorescent

enclosure of the testing cubicles. One or two members of the Targeted

Focus Group unconsciously loosened their neckties as they settled into

the comfortable chairs.

There were more samples of the product arranged on a tray at the

conference table’s center.

This facilitator, just like the one who’d led the large Product Test

and Initial Response assembly earlier that morning before all the

members of the different Focus Groups had been separated into individual

soundproof cubicles to complete their Individual Response

Profiles, held degrees in both Descriptive Statistics and Behavioral

Psychology and was employed by Team
y, a cutting-edge market

research firm that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had begun using almost

exclusively in recent years. This Focus Group’s facilitator was a

stout, palely freckled man with an archaic haircut and a warm if somewhat

nervous and complexly irreverent manner. On the wall next to

the door behind him was a presentation whiteboard with several Dry

Erase markers in its recessed aluminum sill.

The facilitator ...

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...rd),

resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant-grade

frosting whose central pocket — given that the thin coat of outer

frosting’s exposure to the air caused it to assume traditional icing’s

hard-yet-deliquescent marzipan character—seemed even richer, denser,

sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most

rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite

part. (Hostess’s lead agency Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991–2 double-blind

Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45% of younger consumers

actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and

eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their

tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of

R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary

Product Development boys.)