MFour has hired two more employees in Sales and research Operations as its major growth push continues. Cameron Massa joins the Operations team as a Survey Fielding Team Member, devoted to providing clients with quality and consistency in the design and fielding of surveys. His training has included a Software Engineering concentration in Computer Science at the University of La Verne. He’s also been a materials tester in the building industry. Cameron’s leisure interests include playing baseball, gaming, and playing guitar and piano.

Jacob Savage joins the Sales team as a Solutions Development Representative who’ll reach out to brands and market research firms to demonstrate how MFour’s true-mobile solutions can upgrade the quality, consistency, and efficiency of their survey-based research. He’s had previous positions in customer service at AT&T and the Irvine Company, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business from California State University, Fullerton. Jacob’s leisure-time pursuits include surfing, snowboarding, and honing his chops on the guitar.

Welcome aboard, colleagues!

The irony of relying on Big Data to tell you how  your mobile ads are working is that it isn’t big enough. Instead of bringing clarity, an overabundance of aggregate  information will only confuse your efforts -- unless you augment your mountain of Big Data with ’qualitative insights from real people. As management guru Peter Drucker put it, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But you can  measure how high the stakes are for getting mobile ad measurement right:

• Smartphone adoption in the U.S. has reached 77%, according to Pew Research Center, including 92% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Even among somewhat later adopters, ages 50 to 64, smartphone use has reached 74%.

• Advertising has followed consumers onto their smartphones to the tune of $58.3 billion, the amount eMarketer predicts will be spent on U.S. mobile advertising in 2017 – a 15.9% increase.

So finding a way through the current ad-measurement wilderness is crucial. But here’s the problem:

• A recent study by Northwestern University researchers revealed how NOT to do it. The authors warned against “the deficiency of using data alone.” What’s needed, they concluded, is “a theory of behavior, i.e. the mechanism by which advertising works on consumers….Testing should aim to discover the `why,’ not just the `what.’” 

• A commentary by AJ Mathew in Advertising Age entitled “Why We Need a More Human Approach to Mobile Measurement” drives home the point: “Our industry still needs a push to look beyond primitive metrics such as CTR to determine ad effectiveness. Instead, we need to look at advertising performance from a basic, human approach.”

In other words, the consumers you’re trying to reach aren’t just an aggregation of Big Data telling you where they’ve been and what they’ve bought. To get real business insights, including how aware and responsive audiences are to mobile advertising, you’ve got to talk to them. The best way forward is to reach consumers on the devices that define how they interact with today's mobile-centric world.

MFour is currently pioneering a new way to measure mobile ad effectiveness. This new approach allows you to identify the demographic makeup of consumers exposed to your ads – and then survey them to get that crucial human factor. To learn more about the much-needed game-changer in mobile ad measurement, contact sales@mfour.com.

Who’s the 800-pound gorilla of consumer research? The U.S. Government.

The best information we have about how much Americans spend in the aggregate on different categories of consumer products and services comes from the feds, via the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Taxpayers kick in $213.6 million a year to support the research division of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which conducts various surveys that chart economic activity and provide insights that establish important indicators such as the Consumer Price Index.

You don’t have a research budget in the hundreds of millions, but you do have the ability to get consumer insights much faster and in more detail than the feds. We’ll tell you how, but first here’s more on how that 800-pound research gorilla operates.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey involves two different ongoing studies commissioned by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and fielded by the Census Bureau. There’s a written questionnaire called the “interview survey” that focuses on recurring expenses such as rents, mortgages and car payments. Members of this panel fill out a survey each quarter detailing their recurring payments over the previous three months. The second study obtains data about more day-to-day consumer spending. Members of the day-to-day panel keep a diary for two weeks, reporting at the end on each purchase made by a household member.

Using this methodology, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that Americans spent $385.7 billion on eating out, and $514.7 billion to eat at home during 2015. And that the national grocery bill for at-home food consumption included $98.6 billion for fruits and vegetables, and $106.7 billion for meat, poultry, fish, and seafood.

But this method has an obvious recall problem. Even an engaged panelist can get too busy to keep receipts or remember to write down expenditures. So to some extent, Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates ride on its panels’ guestimates. For precise research and Point-of-Emotion® insights, your best bet is an advanced, in-app mobile survey fielded to an engaged all-mobile panel. Using phones’ GPS capabilities, you can GeoLocate consumers and pop them questions when their actions and experiences are freshest in mind.

Guestimates may be good enough for government work, but not for yours. And in MFour’s experience, mobile diarists come through with accurate, validated data because using their phones to report their activities comes naturally – after all, that’s what they’re doing when they post to Facebook. You can expect a re-contact rate of 85% for mobile diary studies and for other projects that call for repeated surveys over time.

To learn more about true-mobile diary studies, contact us at sales@mfour.com.

Here's a special St. Patrick's Day edition of our Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed as you head into the weekend.

• Mobile Consumers State 78% Preference for St. Paddy's Day

• Americans Reveal Their Love Affair with the Color Green

• Did St. Patrick Invent Green Beer? 11.8% Say Yes

And here's a rollicking St. Patrick's Day tune to fuel your holiday revels.

MFour has hired three new quality assurance specialists to support ongoing innovations in mobile survey technology, and to ensure its ever-growing client roster enjoys efficient and consistently effective research experiences.

Michael Mullen joins as a Quality Assurance Engineer, with duties that include testing and developing systems to drive consistently superior technical performance. He arrives with a background in systems testing and tech support, including a recent software engineering position at Barracuda Networks. Hockey, gaming, and hiking are Michael’s leisure-time favorites.

Richard Tsu will support testing of MFour’s systems as a Quality Assurance Analyst. He developed skills in web and mobile software development while earning a Master’s degree in Information Technology from California State University, Fullerton, where he also earned a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting.

Punam Wattamwar joins MFour’s Labs and Engineering team as Senior Quality Assurance Analyst, supporting a variety of technical functions in the design and delivery of research capabilities, with a focus on testing. She’s previously worked in quality assurance at Union Bank and the tech firm ExtremityIndia. Punam has earned two Master’s degrees in Computer Sciences – from California University of Management and Sciences and from University of Pune, India. She enjoys spending leisure hours creating oil paintings and watercolors.

Welcome aboard, colleagues!

St. Patrick’s Day is almost upon us, and here’s what Americans say they’ll be doing to celebrate it – based on a survey of 1,200 respondents from the nation’s only all-mobile panel. Who’s celebrating?

• The vast majority of Americans. 78% of respondents said they’ll be joining in our annual festive observance of all things Irish.

• 28.2% of our respondents self-identified as Irish American – of whom 95% said they’ll celebrate St. Paddy’s.

• Patrick’s Day appeals across racial and ethnic lines. Among our respondents, 87.1% of Asian Americans, 82.7% of Hispanics, 77.8% of Caucasians, and 71.1% of African Americans said they’ll be celebrating.

• It’s also an all-ages event: 82.1% of Millennials (ages 21-34) and 75.2% of Gen X and Baby Boom respondents (ages 35-70) said they’ll celebrate.

How will we be celebrating?

• 9% of survey respondents said they plan to go to a St. Patrick’s Day festival or parade.

• 44.2% plan to celebrate in a restaurant; 39.7% will go to a bar.

• 10.7% plan to take the day off – and with St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Friday this year, for them it’ll be an especially festive kick-start to a long weekend.

Like all holidays, St. Patrick’s Day has its traditional foods and drinks. We listed six options, and asked our respondents which of them they planned to have.

• 76% said they would be consuming at least one of the six choices – rising to 92% of those identifying as Irish.

• Looking at eating, 41% of respondents said that corned beef and cabbage will be on their menu, 23% were looking forward to some shepherd’s pie, and 18% expect to munch some Irish soda bread. More than half of our Irish respondents (57%) said they’ll be having corned beef and cabbage, followed by soda bread (31%), and shepherd’s pie (28%).

• As for drinking – and it’s probably neck and neck whether St. Paddy’s or New Year’s Eve is most noted as an occasion to tip a glass of alcohol – 31% said they’ll imbibe green beer, 28% will toss down Irish whiskey, and 24% will quaff some Guinness. The order of preference was a bit different for Irish American respondents – Irish whiskey came in first (44%), followed by green beer (37%) and Guinness (36%).

• Jameson gets the nod as the Irish whiskey of choice – picked by 70% of respondents who plan to drink whiskey. Bushmill’s was named by 28% of respondents, and five other brands were named by 9% to 18% of whiskey drinkers. Factoring in the 10% who said they have some other brand in mind, we can assume that a fair number of these whiskey consumers are not brand-monogamous. Differences between Irish and non-Irish whiskey drinkers’ brand preferences were negligible.

As we noted in Wednesday’s post focusing on Ireland’s national color, green, 82.2% of our survey-takers plan to wear it for St. Patrick’s Day. An additional 8.9% weren’t sure, and only 8.9% said they definitely won’t be in green. Interestingly, 40.5% of respondents who said they would not be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day nevertheless reported that they were planning to wear something green.

Here’s a toast to a happy and safe holiday for all!

With all due respect to Kermit the Frog, America disagrees with his melancholy take on the color green – especially on St. Patrick’s Day. The Sesame Street character lamented in a wistful song that “it’s not easy being green.” But a pre-St. Paddy’s Day mobile survey of 1,200 Americans reveals near-unanimity on green being a positive force, even if there’s substantial disagreement about exactly which warm feelings green represents.

• 82.1% of respondents said they have “very positive” (42.8%) or “positive” (39.3%) associations with the color green.

• Among those identifying as Irish American, 90% gave green the thumbs up, with 54% choosing “very positive” and 36% picking “positive.”

• None of the study’s Irish American respondents considered green in a negative light, and only 1% of all respondents picked “negative” or “very negative.”

• The dominant emotions respondents reported feeling about green were joy (38.2%), excitement (36.9%), calm (34.4%) and inspiration (28.3%). “Fear” and “sadness” each were mentioned by just 1% of our panel. “Disgust” had 2.6% support – perhaps with Dr. Seuss’s “green eggs and ham” to blame. The strong support for both excitement and calm attests to green’s power as an all-purpose aid to positive feelings. Love, trust, and anticipation were other positive emotions registering support, with each mentioned by 12.8% to 15.1% of respondents.

• Panelists also strongly associated green with money (26.8%) and nature or recycling (23.9%). But the leading connection they drew from a list of ten possibilities not having to do with emotions was to St. Patrick’s Day (35.2%).

• Given their high regard for the color green, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 82% of respondents said they plan to wear it Friday to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. 9% were unsure, and 9% said they won’t be donning anything green. Among Irish Americans, 95% said they’ll be wearing green, and just 3% said they wouldn’t.

• The Irish among us also seem to have the keenest eyes for that lucky green symbol, the four-leaf clover. 61% reported having found one, compared to 48% of non-Irish respondents.

What should businesses make of these findings? Well, our St. Patrick’s Day survey is just for fun, so we won’t make any claims that it has unearthed any serious consumer insights. But you’ve probably noticed that green is MFour’s company color – so we’ve made our bet. Come to think of it, so have Starbucks, Green Giant and Simple Green, among other leading brands. So even from a business perspective, the appeal of green is not mere blarney.

Come back tomorrow for another installment from our survey. We’ll look into what people say about how they plan to eat, drink, and be merry on St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day is fast approaching. So we turned to the only all-mobile platform to collect information about Americans’ perceptions, expectations, and assorted sentiments about the holiday. The aim was not to lay the groundwork for serious business decisions, but just to have some fun. Our 1,200 respondents were happy to play along by sharing their views of the holiday. Here’s what they told us:

• 28.2% of respondents identified as Irish American. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the figure at 10.2%. It just goes to show how cool it is to be Irish as March 17 approaches.

• 94% of the Irish respondents said they’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, while 71% of those who didn’t identify as Irish are ready to party along. In all, 78% of our respondents said they’ll celebrate.

• 82% of all respondents (and 95% of Irish Americans) said they’ll honor the tradition of wearing green, Ireland’s national hue.

• As for the tradition of pinching people who don’t wear green, it’s still alive in this era of anxiety over perceived micro-aggressions. 54% of respondents said they’re ready to inflict festive pain by pinching.

• However, there’s some risk involved: 8.3% of respondents said that if they’re pinched they’ll retaliate with a punch to the face. Men and women reported being almost equally ready use their fists, so watch out.

• An additional 12.8% said they’ll object verbally. 24.9% are ready to pinch back, but 63.1% intend to be good sports and accept a pinch without complaint, as the price of neglecting to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. A few respondents picked more than one answer.

Looking at St. Patrick himself, and the reasons we celebrate him, we gave respondents a list of possible accomplishments  (not all of them true).

• 42.3% correctly picked him as Ireland’s patron saint.

• 25.3% agreed that St. Patrick spread Christianity to Ireland – also correct.

• 23.8% think he liberated Ireland from the British (not true).

• 18.8% believed he rid Ireland of snakes – not a fact, but certainly a widely-believed legend.

• 11.8% concurred with the statement that St. Patrick invented green beer – not exactly true, but without him there never would have been a reason to invent it.

Respondents also were asked, “Have you ever tried to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?” and given a list of possible answers that were strictly facetious.

• 42% reported having indeed gone looking for a pot of gold, and 31% affirmed that, “Yes, I tried, but I got chased away by an angry mob of leprechauns.” Please be assured we won’t plant anything like this in one of your own surveys.

But for now, the fun continues. Stay tuned to the MFour blog for the rest of this week for more amusing insights we obtained by fielding the world’s first and only all-mobile, app-driven survey about the customs, quirks, and prerogatives that come with celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.

And may your eyes be smiling, whether you’re Irish or not!

St. Patrick’s Day is on the way, and on Friday most Americans will be paying homage – knowingly or not – to a man who lived about 1,600 years ago, became the patron saint of Ireland, and now beckons people of all races, creeds, and nationalities to wear green and get tipsy in his honor.

MFour has a natural affinity for St. Paddy’s Day – you’ve surely noticed that green is our signature color, and we wear it proudly. We could say that’s the main reason we fielded a special survey to gather insights into the who, what, and how of Americans’ St. Patrick’s Day festivities. But the truth is, we just wanted to have some silly fun and invite you to join in.

Can you believe that 23% of our 1,200 respondents said they plan to eat shepherd’s pie this Friday? Shepherd’s pie??!!? Clearly, St. Patrick’s Day packs considerable power to motivate unusual consumer behavior. And that’s just a sneak preview of the amazing insights we’ve obtained.

On Tuesday we’ll share a bunch of juicy tidbits on a variety of subjects pertaining to St. Patrick’s Day – including how many Americans entertain fantasies about being chased by Leprechauns. On Wednesday we will share what our respondents told us about the color green. On Thursday we’ll give you an in-depth look at how Americans say they’ll be celebrating the big day (Guinness or Jameson? Will shepherd’s pie overtake corned beef and cabbage?).

And our weekly Friday roundup of blog highlights will recap our St. Patrick’s Day study, and share a YouTube video of a rousing Irish tune to enliven your own celebration. That’s the plan anyway – unless, of course, we get chased by Leprechauns.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you kick off your weekend.

• Mobile GeoLocation Study Reveals Shopper Recall Failures

• Reach Buyers in Real Time to Capture Brand Preferences

• Satisfaction Index Shows How Time Affects Shopper Recall

And here's a Friday tune to get you ready for a rockin' time this weekend.