Walk into a modern grocery store and you will confront a world of things you would never think to ask for: Lemon-lime cat litter, hydroponic rutabaga, crystal-clear dishwashing liquid. Why these things and not others? Somehow someone has determined that you would probably buy them. These days, the somehow of choice is the focus group. "More than any other research technique that I know of," advertising executive Larry Chiagouris testifies, "the focus group has had the single largest impact on what people see on TV and therefore, presumably, what they buy."

In the past ten years, the focus group has infiltrated our shopping malls and Hollywood movies, our legal system and our television screens. But it is not quite the innovation it seems. Do we not already have a permanent focus group in our families, our circles of friends -- critiquing our clothes, our bodies, our habits, our attitudes, our manner of speech, allegedly with our own best interests in mind? They claim they are only bolstering our marketability in a world that will judge us on first glance, and for the most part we rely on their advice, even though we know their judgments are partisan ones.

The personal focus group, however, offers us a more formal methodology, or at least a little objectivity, the kind only a roomful of strangers can provide. Why turn to a friend or a lover or a shrink when you can call upon ten dispassionate observers to evaluate your new threads or your latest pick-up line? Never a publication to stand in the way of consumerism's evolutionary march, FEED has dispatched intrepid reporter Steve Bodow into the belly of the market research beast. His mission: to pose as the Product, and spend two nail-biting hours as the object of a focus group. And what better topic for discussion than that most elusive of qualities -- dating appeal? As nine women gather around the table, the tough questions emerge: What do you think of when you think of the Bodow product? How might it be improved? How does it fare when measured against the competition? Of course, psychological probing of this type requires a sure touch. We needed a bona fide marketing therapist -- "focus group moderator" being the industry term -- to help put together and run the session. Casey Sweet, president of Quesst Research, proved more than up to the task.

The whole notion of a personal focus group may sound crazy, but in era of the home page and public access show, maybe the affordable focus group for today's average working man or woman is an idea whose moment has come. Like a weekly massage or therapy for your beagle, what once seemed the lavish and indulgent province of the rich and famous could become a necessity for living in the modern world. Who, after all, in this age of economic anxiety and spiritual aimlessness, has time or energy for trial and error? Who has strength to sift through the wreckage of his or her romantic past in hopes of stumbling upon the answer of what went wrong? Accept that you are a product -- and you are, a walking assembly of them -- and maybe through the findings of a focus group you may discover the key to transformation. Or at least you can find out why the girls don't dig you, why the guys always seem to turn away. And what you may discover is not that you are a loser, but that another product, over there across the room, ha s a brighter package. This is information you can use.