In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy’s snack cake production sequence and the complex adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. The relevant information was relayed in a skillfully orchestrated QA period, with many of the specified questions supplied by two ostensible members of the Targeted Focus Group who were in fact not civilian consumers at all but employees of Team Δy assigned to help orchestrate the unconventionally informative QA, and to observe the deliberations of the other twelve men once the facilitator left the room, taking care not to influence the Focus Group’s arguments or verdicts but later adding personal observations and impressions that would help round and flesh out the data provided by the Group Response Data Summary and the digital videotape supplied by what appeared to be a large smoke detector in the conference room’s northwest corner, whose lens and parabolic mike, while mobile and state-of-the-art, invariably failed to catch certain subtle nuances in individual affect as well as low-volume interchanges between adjoining members. One of the UAFs,* a slim young man with waxy blond hair and a complexion whose redness appeared more irritated than ruddy or hale, had been allowed by Team Δy’s UAF Coordinator to cultivate an eccentric and (to most Focus Group members) irritating set of personal mannerisms whose very conspicuousness served to disguise his professional identity: he had small squeeze bottles of both contact lens lubricant and intranasal saline before him on the table, and not only took written notes on the facilitator’s presentation but did so with a Magic Marker that squeaked loudly and had ink you could smell, and whenever he asked one of his preassigned questions he did not tentatively raise his hand or clear his throat as other UAFs were wont but rather simply tersely barked out, ‘Question:’, as in: ‘Question: is it possible to be more specific about what “natural and artificial flavors” means, and is there any substantive difference between what it really means and what the average consumer is expected to understand it to mean,’ without any sort of interrogative lilt or expression, his brow furrowed and rimless glasses very askew.
As any decent small-set univariable probability distribution would predict, not all members of the Targeted Focus Group were attending closely to the facilitator’s explanation of what Mister Squishy and Team Δy hoped to achieve by leaving the Focus Group alone very shortly in camera to compare the results of their Individual Response Profiles and speak openly and without interference amongst themselves and attempt to come as close as possible to a unanimous univocal Group Response Data Summary of the product along sixteen different radial Preference and Satisfaction axes. A certain amount of this inattention was factored into the matrices of what the TFG’s facilitator had been informed was the actual test underway on today’s nineteenth floor. This secondary (or, ‘nested’) test sought quantifiable data on quote unquote Full-Access manufacturing and marketing information’s effects on Targeted Focus Groups’ perceptions of both the product and its corporate producer; it was a double-blind series, designed to be replicated along three different variable grids with random TFGs throughout the next two fiscal quarters, and sponsored by parties whose identities were being withheld from the facilitators as (apparently) part of the nested test’s conditions.
Three of the Targeted Focus Group’s members were staring absently out the large tinted window that gave on a delicately muted sepia view of the street’s north side’s skyscrapers and, beyond and between these, different bits of the northeast Loop and harbor and several feet of severely foreshortened lake. Two of these members were very young men at the extreme left of the demotarget’s x axis who sat slumped in their tilted swivels in attitudes of either reverie or stylized indifference; the third was feeling absently at his upper lip’s little dent.
The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator’s name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group’s fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign. A twelfth, by far the TFG’s oldest member, had the platinum fob of a quality pocketwatch running diagonally left-right across his vest and a big pink face and the permanent benevolent look in his eyes of someone older who had many grandchildren and spent so much time looking warmly at them that the expression becomes almost ingrained. Schmidt’s own grandfather had lived in a north Florida retirement community where he sat with a plaid blanket on his lap and coughed constantly both times Schmidt had ever been in his presence, addressing him only as Boy. Precisely 50 % of the room’s men wore coats and ties or had suitcoats or blazers hanging from the back of their chairs, three of which coats were part of an actual three-piece business wardrobe; another three men wore combinations of knit shirts, slacks, and various crew- and turtleneck sweaters classifiable as Business Casual. Schmidt lived alone in a condominium he had recently refinanced. The remaining four men wore bluejeans and sweatshirts with the logo of either a university or the garment’s manufacturer; one was the Nike Swoosh icon that to Schmidt always looked somewhat Arabic. Three of the four men in conspicuously casual/sloppy attire were the Focus Group’s youngest members, two of whom were among the three making rather a show of not attending closely. Team Δy favored a loose demographic grid. Two of the three youngest men were under 21. All three of these youngest members sat back on their tailbones with their legs uncrossed and their hands spread out over their thighs and their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning. Schmidt’s initial undergraduate concentration had been in Statistical Chemistry; he still enjoyed the clinical precision of a lab. Less than 50 % of the room’s total footwear involved laces. One man in a knit shirt had small brass zippers up the sides of low-cut boots that were shined to a distracting gleam, another detail possessed of mnemonic associations for Schmidt. Unlike Terry Schmidt’s and Ron Mounce’s, Darlene Lilley’s own marketing background was in computer-aided design; she’d come into Research because she said she’d discovered she was really more of a people person at heart. There were four pairs of eyeglasses in the room, although one of these pairs were sunglasses and possibly not prescription, another with heavy black frames that gave their wearer’s face an earnest aspect above his dark turtleneck sweater. There were two mustaches and one probable goatee. A stocky man in his late twenties had a sort of sparse, mossy beard; it was indeterminable whether this man was just starting to grow a beard or whether he was the sort of person whose beard simply looked this way. Among the youngest men, it was obvious which were sincerely in need of a shave and which were just affecting an unshaved look. Two of the Focus Group’s members had the distinctive blink patterns of men wearing contact lenses in the conference room’s astringent air. Five of the men were more than 10 % overweight, Terry Schmidt himself excluded. His high-school PE teacher had once referred to Terry Schmidt in front of his peers as the Crisco Kid, which he had laughingly explained meant fat in the can. Schmidt’s own father, a decorated combat veteran, had recently retired from a company that sold seed, nitrogen fertilizer, and broad-spectrum herbicides in downstate Galesburg. The affectedly eccentric UAF was asking the men on either side of him, one of whom was Hispanic, whether they’d perhaps care for a chewable vitamin C tablet. The Mister Squishy icon also reappeared in the conference room as the stylized finials of two fine beige or tan ceramic lamps on side tables at either end of the windowless interior wall. There were two African-American males in the Targeted Focus Group, one over 30, the one under 30 with a shaved head. Three of the men had hair classifiable as brown, two gray or salt/pepper, another three black (excluding the African-Americans and the Focus Group’s lone oriental, whose nametag and overwhelming cheekbones suggested either Laos or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — for complex but solid statistical reasons, Scott Laleman’s team’s Profile grids specified distributions for ethnicity but not national origin); three could be called blond or fair-haired. These distributions included the UAFs, and Schmidt felt he already had a good idea who this Group’s other UAF was. Rarely did R.S.B. Focus Groups include representatives of the very pale or freckled red-haired physical type, though Foote, Cone & Belding and D.D.B. Needham both made regular use of such types because of certain data suggesting meaningful connections between melanin quotients and continuous probability distributions of income and preference on the US East Coast, where over 70 % of upmarket products tested. Some of the trendy hypergeometric techniques on which these data were based had been called into question by more traditional demographic statisticians, however.