Here’s a message for all who’ll attend The Quirk’s Event West next week in Irvine, CA: Welcome to the neighborhood!

MFour’s headquarters is just two miles from the Hotel Irvine, the event site where we’ll all be getting reacquainted. Be sure to stop by booth #715 to talk about your survey technology and panel needs – but especially to play! That’s right. You get to step into our “Surveys on the Blow” Cash-Grab Wind Booth and snag all the greenbacks you can as they swirl about you. Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson – and you. Grabbers keepers!

The fun doesn’t stop there. You also get to play around with programming a demo survey with MFourDIY™ – the nation’s only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building platform. See your design come together on our big screen. You’ll also hear the latest about MFour’s ad-measurement capabilities across all channels, including the just-introduced Mobile Ad Metrics OnDemand solution. So come visit us and enjoy some hometown hospitality. If you need more details, feel free to contact us at sales@mfour.com. See you soon!

MFour is pleased to announce Darren Clark as its Chief Operating Officer. Bringing more than 15 years of executive experience, Darren will play a leading role in guiding MFour as it expands its staff, introduces new products, and sets increasingly higher standards for mobile market research technology. Darren’s key task is ensuring that clients continue to receive the highest level of technology and service during this time of accelerating growth.

To see the full announcement, click here. 

Mitchell Jacobs, Chris Nguyen, Adam Barnhart (L-R)

MFour has hired three new employees whose expertise will help drive the ongoing advancement of research technology and survey programming quality that make the company the leading innovator in mobile market research.

Adam Barnhart joins as Survey Programming and Data Processing Manager, a supervisorial position in which he’ll oversee the Operations Department’s workflow, which involves everything from programming to data processing, driving on-time, error-free results for MFour clients. Adam arrives with extensive technical and managerial experience in market research, including more than 20 years with the market research firm Survox/CfMC. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History and Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also served as a teaching fellow. Adam is also a bass player, an avid sports fan (Lakers, Angels, Liverpool Football Club), and a family man with two children, two dogs, and a wife who’s a veterinarian.

Chris Nguyen joins as a Quality Assurance Engineer who’ll focus on processes that safeguard the security and integrity of mobile data, ensuring smooth performance and software updates for MFour’s Surveys On The Go® research app. He arrives from Ticketmaster, where he played a comparable role in assuring data security. Chris earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton.  

Mitchell Jacobs comes aboard as a Quality Assurance Specialist whose duties focus on perfecting internal processes to deliver the highest quality data for MFour clients. Mitchell previously worked in quality assurance at Numecent, Inc., and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. In his spare time, Mitchell likes to turn his technical know-how to music production and sound design.

Welcome Aboard!

We’re honored that Forbes Magazine highlighted MFour’s signature Surveys On The Go® research app in a recent article under the headline “How To Make Extra Money Using Mobile Apps.” We’re especially pleased that writer Maya Kachroo-Levine captured the essence of the app’s significance when she wrote that, in addition to giving users a source of extra earnings, our survey experience “can be really interesting.”

Important business decisions ride on what consumers say -- including getting maximum impact from an advertising campaign by pre-testing, then measuring how consumers respond to messaging. It's therefore imperative to make sure that respondents are fully engaged when taking surveys. Amazingly, this point apparently has been lost on many market research professionals and their clients – to the vocal dismay of the authors of the GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report.

According to the GRIT report, quality data and insights depend on having a quality panel that’s deeply engaged in answering questions thoughtfully. But only 50% of GRIT respondents said that a quality sample source is important. Even more disconcerting to the authors was this remarkable statistic: only 4% of clients and 7% of research providers agree it’s important “that your participants speak highly of their market research experience [and] convince people they know to participate in research.”

In today’s mobile-centric world, survey respondents demand rewarding experiences. That’s one of the reasons why Surveys On The Go® is the highest-rated and most downloaded survey app. The Surveys On The Go® app – and the one million-plus panelists who use it – are delivering rich insights that arise from gratifying experiences with their smartphone features. Every other panel provider will paint you a rosy picture of its panel’s engagement, and you’ll have to take their word for it. MFour’s panelists, on the other hand, speak for themselves – literally – by posting unsolicited comments and ratings about their experiences at the App Store and on Google Play.

But don’t listen to us. Listen to the experts from GreenBook. And listen to our panelists. If Forbes knows what to look for in a mobile research app, so should you. A good point of entry is MFourDIY™ – the industry’s only true-mobile DIY survey-building platform. To learn more, contact sales@mfour.com.

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

• Don't Be Clueless About "Mobile Optimized" Surveys. Compare!

• Lift the Fog to Get Metrics You Can Trust

• Taming Market Research's Elephant in the Room

And here's a Friday tune to get your tail wagging as you head into your weekend.

Comparison shopping is fun, and it’s always smart. In that spirit, you’re getting a chart to give you a quick start on choosing your mobile research provider. The checklist has mobile musts and one must-avoid – always beware of “mobile optimized” surveys that try to substitute mere appearances for technological substance. Instead, look closely at how the different mobile providers stack up in the categories that reflect real commitment to true-mobile research.

A note on terminology: GeoIntercepts are a generic GPS-enabled technology that can locate consumers in a certain vicinity when their phones’ “location” function is turned on. MFour’s GeoValidation® process, on the other hand, makes sure they’ve been exactly where you need them to be. Cached surveys, another feature from MFour, are questionnaires that load instantly into panelists’ phones. There’s no need for an often-unreliable connection to a web-based online questionnaire, because cached surveys are embedded in a mobile app. In-app surveys are natural and reliably easy for respondents, which leads to another indispensable mobile “must” – a large, demographically representative, highly-engaged all-mobile active panel.

The simple chart below can be summarized in a simple equation: only advanced, true-mobile technology plus an engaged, true-mobile panel will ever add up to successful mobile research. Understanding this, you’ll shop successfully for mobile solutions and never have to settle for wrong answers again. Let your comparison shopping begin.

Like it or not, we’re living in the Post-Quality Era.

Convenience and speed are now foremost in consumers’ expectations; the notion that some things are worth waiting for seems increasingly quaint. Intrinsic, commonly-accepted measures of “quality” that prevailed not long ago are still precious to some, but not the main consideration for most. And yet, along with being fast and convenient, the actual consumer experience must meet an acceptable standard of quality.

The need for utmost speed and convenience puts brands in a perpetual earthquake zone, with fault lines threatening to disrupt every familiar process they’ve had for creating and selling their products. What do consumers want? Will maximizing convenience and speed undermine quality to the point where satisfaction sinks and sales collapse? With everything on shaky ground, good research data is more essential than ever.

You know the stories about the sweeping changes that have transformed music, media, technology and other industries. Seemingly ironclad brands failed to anticipate or respond effectively to change as each assumed that its reputation for quality would matter more than newer, faster, more convenient ways to access information and entertainment. Their bottom lines over the past decade or more say it wasn’t so.

A new report from Boston Consulting Group entitled “How Digital Delivery Puts the Restaurant Value Chain Up for Grabs” forecasts similar disruption in the restaurant business. Increasingly, it says, food alone won’t win diners’ hearts. Getting it delivered fast and on demand, either by the restaurant itself or by a third-party who takes orders and handle deliveries for multiple restaurants, may be the new prime directive. Diners, like music and news consumers, will value effortless eating over investing the time it takes to eat out.

Meanwhile, as with news and music, there will still be a substantial market for the legacy experience of dining out. Will restaurants be able to satisfy both kinds of consumer preferences? How should they price dine-in and delivery options? Will convenience alone instill customer loyalty? Does excellent quality generate profits?  Should restaurants try to reward the dine-in experience over the deliver-out option?         

Answering these questions and many more will be imperative not just for restaurants, but for all kinds of products and services that must negotiate balances and tradeoffs between demands for convenience and speed on one hand, and quality on the other. Market research is no exception. Suppliers must provide tools that are fast and convenient, yet capable of satisfying clients’ demand for quality data and productive insights.  

It’s with that in mind that MFourDIY™ was created. The first true-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building tool gives you the speed and convenience of intuitive, easy-to-used DIY technology. Quality data springs from a panel of more than a million smartphone respondents who are engaged by survey experiences that are fun and easy. For more on getting speed and convenience without sacrificing quality, just click here.

We’d never had a client fly in naked and carrying a bow before, but this was the one and only Cupid, and he needed our help.

After all these years of winging it, Cupid realized that he needs some mobile targeting to optimize his aim when he lets his arrows fly. The divorce rate told him that too many of his shots were missing the mark. With Valentine’s Day approaching, he needed to put some fresh insights in his quiver. Could we help?

We said we’d try, but how do you measure romance?

Well, like everything else, love has a consumer dimension. So we GeoFenced every major national outlet for flowers, candy and jewelry. Then we waited for natural shoppers among our million-plus active mobile panelists to show up and go about purchasing those all-important tokens of affection. Using proprietaryGeoIntensity® and GeoNotification® technologies, we delivered  exit surveys directly on their smartphones as they left the stores with gift purchases in hand – and quickly landed 1,000 demographically representative, GeoValidated® responses that gave vivid insights into what these romantic consumers had bought, and why.

Because the data displayed in real time as it came in, Cupid was able to fly out instantly to strike the biggest spenders with his arrows, tracking them down by their smartphones’ GPS location. Cupid said he’s hoping for insights into whether extravagant gift-giving correlates with lasting love.

There’s more research to come tonight – Valentine’s Day night. Again we’ll use GeoLocation to push surveys to panelists as they leave prominent restaurants, nightclubs, and other landmarks that couples frequent on their special occasions. Attitudes, behaviors, intention to buy (into a relationship, that is) – we’ll be asking about all of it, down to whether certain respondents remained calm when their dates ordered the lobster AND the filet mignon AND a $100 bottle of wine.

Of course, love doesn’t always happen in one night, so MFour is partnering with Cupid on an ongoing tracking study. At regular intervals we’ll be pushing surveys to members of our all-mobile panel at weddings, romantic hotels, on cruise ships, and, yes, in divorce courts – the whole works, to get their thoughts on falling in or out of love. We’re also discussing whether to do a recruit and kiss. Cupid is depending on us, because he wants to make those arrows count.

The research is gratis, of course, because what the world needs now is love sweet love, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. And we want to do our part to help.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! May Cupid’s arrows hit their mark and send you into whatever embrace is just right for you.

And here’s a musical tribute to our newest client from one of the greatest singers ever. Sing it again, Sam!

Like all other business activities, advertising is moving headlong into the mobile realm for a very good reason: it's where you’ll find consumers -- glued to their smartphones. But change is coming so fast that brands lack reliable measures of how well their mobile ads are doing in raising awareness and driving sales. Now MFour is introducing a solution: Mobile Ad Metrics OnDemand – a method that lets researchers see within a matter of hours how well brands’ mobile ads are working.

Here’s how it works: Each ad received on a smartphone generates a unique ID number. Advertisers give us the IDs, then we match them against more than one million consumers on the nation’s largest all-mobile research panel. Mobile Ad Metrics OnDemand lifts the fog and provides previously hidden key indicators for ad performance. Solutions include:

• Verified basic & advanced demographics
• Mobile & in-app measurement
• Individual ad metrics or full-campaign options
• Same-day data delivery

Like all MFour clients, advertisers will get to know their audience by more than 200 demographic points: age, gender, ethnicity, income, region, marital status – even by whether they drive a pickup truck, an SUV, or a sedan. The panelist profiles will be that precise.

And be assured, our panel is America. The nation’s largest, most demographically representative panel precisely mirrors the mobile audiences you want to understand, including hard-to-reach Millennials, Hispanics, and African Americans.

With demographics in hand, you can survey your audience to measure preferences for brands and products – and now you can finally see how mobile ads influence those preferences.

To find out more about Mobile Ad Metrics OnDemand and all other MFour products, just e-mail us at sales@mfour.com or call 714-754-1234.

There’s an elephant in the room where market research lives, and it's playing havoc with brands' tracking studies.

The elephant is the widely lamented drastic decline in online sample quality and demographic representation. Studies, including trackers, struggle to reach enough young people and minorities. The result is a loss of continuity in tracking data as time goes by and online sample becomes increasingly less reliable in representing consumer reality. unreflective of consumer reality.

Still, it's not easy to accept the need for change. There's a natural human tendency to stick with what we know, and to continue using methods that have served us well over time. 

But now it's crucial to recognize that times have changed, and that consumer insights professionals need to adapt to the definitive new reality: mobile consumers want mobile experiences, and that includes participating in market research surveys. 

 MFour is the leader in connecting brands with mobile consumers, including full quotas of Millennials, Hispanics, African-Americans and Gen Z who need to be represented in tracking studies.

There's a way to adjust trackers gradually by migrating your outreach to smartphone-centric consumer groups to mobile, while preserving an online element for older, more PC-oriented demographics for as long as it seems to make sense.

Taming the elephant is easier than you think, if you think mobile when you think of trackers.