Friday, May 25, 2018

Do we need to use focus groups to create better yearbooks?

We should listen to our customers, and even more closely to our non-customers.

But focus groups are unlikely to provide anything useful for you and your staffs. As Steve Jobs once said, "“It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

What I love most about yearbooks are the SURPRISES I encounter as I turn the pages. Who wants a yearbook (or a newsmagazine, or a broadcast) that simply gives us what we expected (or asked for in a focus group)? I see books, spreads, writing, visuals all the time that I never saw coming. I didn't know I would be delighted until I was, well, delighted. I could say the same about numerous movies, TV shows, etc.

Focus groups can be great for the ones leading the group, receiving the feedback they wanted all along. Such groups certainly check a management box such as "reaches out to customers and seeks input from them," but I have never seen random comments from students produce an "aha!" insight that leads to a future book that sells like hotcakes.

If you ask most students, they will opt for MORE photos and fewer captions... more photos of THEM, and more pages in the book, all at a lower cost. Sounds like promises about health care.

Yearbooks are somewhat immune to normal market forces, of course, since most students (and parents) buy them as a matter of course (it's tradition... it's history... our family has always done this...). In fact, the very heart of the yearbook business model is to sell books long before they are printed, or even fully reported. In a sense, LAST year's volume sells this year's. Yes, we count on selling some books after delivery, but charge a hefty penalty since we have to guess at those numbers (and may get stuck with lots of extra books if we guess wrong).

Think of how rare it is that we buy stuff sight unseen, mostly on faith. But that's what we ask yearbook customers to do, year after year.

The reasons students DO NOT buy yearbooks are legion, but likely culprits include raw cost, the potential buyer not feeling part of the larger school community (why buy a history of something I didn't much like?), clunky ordering processes, and more. But the quality of the book is rarely the key to sales success.

After all, would some kid at a school with a mediocre book trade for an amazing book from a school down the road? I would argue that the culture of the school is the key predictor of yearbook sales and that culture has lots of moving parts.

Maybe it's the school administration that needs to develop focus groups!

There are amazing yearbooks being distributed this month to a small percentage of the student body, and there are some pedestrian yearbooks with market penetrations north of 90 percent. In other words, there is something other than quality at work in sales. I'm not arguing that quality doesn't matter (it certainly does to the adviser and staff), just that it doesn't guarantee popularity.

No one asked, but my advice is to build a yearbook staff that is more reflective of the wider school community. That diverse staff can act as a running focus group that produces what the market wants.

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