Focus Groups - does & don'ts

I have been having quite a few discussions about the use of focus groups in the development of advertising concepts - internally and with my favorite client

I think everyone will agree that focus groups can play an important role in determining advertising strategy. The groups can be used for idea generation and to discover potential concepts with appeal to the group participants. You expose the concepts to determine group reactions and winning concepts can then be developed into actual advertisements. In other words - the strategic learning you discover becomes important input into the creative development process.

Then once you've developed the advertising / advertisments you might want to test that (quantitatively) to find the impact of a particular ad on purchase intent, product/service/corporate imagery, believability, recall of the actual ad and the message of the ad, and the extent to which people can identify the product/service/ corporation being advertised.

If this second stage research indicates problems in any of these areas, it is appropriate to use groups to "fine-tune" an ad.

But one thing is for certain - doing everything at the same time in 6-8 weeks is tough.
Merry Christmas.