Terry Schmidt himself was hypoglycemic and could eat only confections prepared with fructose, aspartame, or very small amounts of C6H8(OH)6, and sometimes he felt himself looking at trays of the product with the expression of an urchin at a toystore’s window.
Down the hall and past the MROP* Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background. Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had been told which of today’s TFGs represented the nested test’s control group, though it was pretty obvious. You had to work on the upper floors for some time before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s structural design accommodated winds off the lake. ‘Question: just what exactly is polysorbate 80?’ Schmidt was reasonably certain that none of the Focus Group felt the sway. It was not pronounced enough even to cause movement in the coffee in any of the iconized mugs on the table that Schmidt, standing and rotating the Dry Erase marker in his hand in an absent way that connoted both informality and a slight humanizing nervousness in front of groups, could see down into. The conference table was heavy pine with lemonwood inlays and a thick coat of polyurethane, and without the window’s sepia tint there would be blinding pockets of reflected sun that changed angle as one’s own angle with respect to the sun and table changed. Schmidt would also have had to watch dust and tiny clothing fibers swirl in columns of direct sunlight and fall very gently onto everyone’s heads and upper bodies, which occurred in even the cleanest conference rooms and was one of Schmidt’s least favorite things about the untinted interiors of certain other agencies’ conference rooms around the Loop and metro area. Sometimes when waiting or on Hold on the phone Schmidt would put his finger inside his mouth and hold it there for no good reason he could ever ascertain. Darlene Lilley, who was married and the mother of a large-headed toddler whose photograph adorned her desk and hutch at Team Δy, had, three fiscal quarters past, been subjected to unwelcome sexual advances by one of the four Senior Research Directors who liaisoned between the Field and Technical Processing teams and the upper echelons of Team Δy under Alan Britton, advances and duress more than sufficient for legal action in Schmidt’s and most of the rest of their Field Team’s opinions, which advances she had been able to deflect and defuse in an enormously skillful manner without raising any of the sort of hue and cry that could divide a firm along gender and/or political lines, and things had been allowed to cool down and blow over to such an extent that Darlene Lilley, Schmidt, and the three other members of their Field Team all now still enjoyed a productive working relationship with this dusky and pungent older Senior Research Director, who was now in fact overseeing Field research on the Mister Squishy-R.S.B. project, and Terry Schmidt was personally somewhat in awe of the self-possession and interpersonal savvy Darlene had displayed throughout the whole tense period, an awe tinged with an unwilled element of romantic attraction, and it is true that Schmidt at night in his condominium sometimes without feeling as if he could help himself masturbated to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous laminate conference tables of the firms they conducted statistical market research for, and this was a tertiary cause of what practicing social psychologists would call his MAM* with the board’s marker as he used a modulated tone of off-the-record confidence to tell the Focus Group about some of the more dramatic travails Reesemeyer Shannon Belt had had with establishing the product’s brand-identity and coming up with the test name Felony! all the while envisioning in a more autonomic part of his brain Darlene delivering nothing but the standard minimal pre-GRDS instructions for her own Focus Group as she stood in her dark Hanes hosiery and the burgundy high heels she kept at work in the bottom-right cabinet of her hutch and changed out of her crosstrainers into every morning the moment she sat down and rolled her chair with small pretend whimpers of effort over to the hutch’s cabinets, sometimes (unlike Schmidt) pacing slightly in front of the whiteboard, sometimes planting one heel and rotating her foot slightly or crossing her sturdy ankles to lend her standing posture a carelessly demure aspect, sometimes taking her delicate oval eyeglasses off and not chewing on the arm but holding the glasses in such a way and in such proximity to her mouth that one got the idea she could, at any moment, put one of the frames’ arm’s plastic earguards just inside her mouth and nibble on it absently, an unconscious gesture of shyness and concentration at once.
The conference room’s carpeting was magenta pile in which wheels left symmetrically distended impressions when one or more of the men adjusted their executive swivel chairs slightly to reposition their legs or their bodies’ relation to the table itself. The ventilation system laid a pale hum over tiny distant street and city noises which the window’s thickness itself cut to almost nothing. Each of the Targeted Focus Group’s members wore a blue-and-white nametag with his first name inscribed thereon by hand. 42.8 % of these inscriptions were cursive or script; three of the remaining eight were block capitals, with all the block-cap first names, in a remarkable but statistically meaningless coincidence, beginning with H. Sometimes, too, Schmidt would as it were take a step back inside his head and view the Focus Group as a unit, a right-angled mass of fleshtone busts; he’d observe all the faces at once, qua group, so that nothing but the very broadest commonalities passed through his filter. The faces were well-nourished, mid- to upscale, neutral, provisionally attentive, the blood-fed minds behind them occupied with their own owners’ lives, jobs, problems, plans, desires, & c. None had been hungry a day in their lives — this was a core commonality, and for Schmidt this one did ramify. It was rare that the product ever truly penetrated a Focus Group’s consciousness. One of the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never going to have as important a place in a TFG’s minds as it did in the Client’s. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the brand and what was important to consumers. And what was important to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves. What they conceived themselves to be. The Focus Groups made little difference in the long run — the only true test was real sales, in Schmidt’s personal opinion. Part of today’s design was to go past lunch and keep the members eating only confections. Assuming a normal breakfasttime prior to arrival, one could expect their blood sugar to start heading down sharply by 11:30. The ones who ate the most Felonies! would be hit the hardest. Among other symptoms, low blood sugar produces oscitance, irritability, lowered inhibitions — their game-faces would begin to slip a bit. Some of the TFG strategies could be extremely manipulative or even abusive in the name of data. A bleach-alternative detergent’s agency had once hired Team Δy to convene primipara mothers aged 29 to 34 whose TATs had indicated insecurities at three key loci and to administer questionnaires whose items were designed to provoke and/or heighten those insecurities — Do you ever have negative or hostile feelings towards your child? How often do you feel as if you must hide or deny the fact that your parenting skills are inadequate? Have teachers or other parents ever made remarks about your child which embarrassed you? How often do you feel as if your child looks shabby or unclean in comparison to other children? Have you ever neglected to launder, bleach, mend or iron your child’s clothes because of time constraints? Does your child ever seem sad or anxious for no reason you can understand? Can you think of a time when your child appeared to be frightened of you? Does your child’s behavior or appearance ever provoke negative feelings in you? Have you ever said or thought negative things about your child? & c. — which, over eleven hours and six separate rounds of carefully designed questionnaires, brought the women to such an emotional state that truly invaluable data on how to pitch Cheer Xtra in terms of very deep maternal anxieties and conflicts emerged. . data that so far as Schmidt had been able to see went wholly unexploited in the campaign the agency had finally sold P. & G. on. Darlene Lilley had later said she had felt like calling the Focus Group’s women and apologizing and letting them know that they’d been totally set up and manhandled, emotionally speaking.