The most innovative people don't care much about focus groups. The idea that focus groups are representative for the way companies understand market corresponds to a conservative view of the dynamics of the market, IMO. As I said,
usually, markets behave conservatively: new products are simply incrementally bettered versions of old products.
I was born before the internet, and I never felt the need to check my email before actually having an email account. I certainly didn't want to have a facebook account before there was facebook. Nor did I need or want to have
something like a facebook account. Of course, people do want or "need" cell phones, but they couldn't want to use cell phones before someone invented mobile phone technology and before some company risked large amounts of cash to promote it and distribute it. Because some such risks lead to failure. Entrepreneurial anticipation of future preferences is not always right. If it were, there would be no entrepreneurial risk.
Anticipating that people
would buy X if X became available on the market is not
necessarily discovering a need for X that was "there." Again, sometimes it turns out that an entrepreneur who bet his money on such an anticipation was wrong.
P.S. No war--just arguments.