Online marketing research forums -- or bulletin board focus groups -- add important "time extension" to traditional depth interviews. Online Discussion Forums are virtual discussions conducted via exclusive online portals custom built for the marketing research project.
These highly involved qualitative marketing research discussions unfold over extended time frames. Forums, sometimes referred to as "qualitative bulletin boards" or "bulletin board focus groups (BBFG), deliver an outstanding qualitative method: forums have the interactive advantages of focus groups or face-to-face IDIs with the efficiencies and response validity of online interviewing technology.