Google knows a thing or two about searches – including which devices people use when they’re in consumer mode, searching for information about products they’re thinking of buying. Here’s some advice based on insights from MediaPost’s rundown on a recent Google report about who’s searching for what—and on which devices.

1. Make sure your content displays perfectly on mobile, because “marketers can no longer count on consumers to make room in their busy lives for large screens.”

2. Don’t hesitate to act, because campaigns and consumer studies that fail to emphasize mobile will fall through a big crack. Forty percent of the web-searching public is only using smartphones.

3. Don’t assume that some product categories may be exceptions to this trend. Over the past year, mobile product searches have shot up 40% to 45% for a diverse array of consumer sectors, including home and garden, apparel, and consumer electronics.

The mobile era has arrived with dizzying speed, so it isn’t easy to comprehend its implications. But life on mobile is the new reality, and they who hesitate to adapt are lost. There’s some great advice for marketers and researchers embedded in the non-technical meaning of “mobile,” which is the capacity to be on the move. Get a move on and you’ll get where you need to go.

 

Setting aside any pros and cons concerning the outcome of Trump vs. Clinton, here, in the spirit of offering some post-election food for thought, are three questions to ponder from a marketing and research perspective.

• In the aftermath of misfiring political polls, should market research companies be checking in with their clients, and corporate market research departments with their in-house constituencies, to make sure everyone understands that data and insights from well-conceived consumer surveys remain trustworthy?

• Along with perceptions about the candidates themselves, how much did general, widespread discontent over how government has been functioning factor into the discrepancies between pollsters’ predictions and the election results?

• How much have external conditions –- including widespread discontent with how government has been functioning in the context of this election -- contributed to the gap between the polls and the actual results?

• Are enacted government policies equivalent to product lines, with the public as the targeted consumers?

Whatever the answers, the takeaway is that there’s always a gap between what we think we know, and how consumers actually think and feel. Because the public is always changing in unpredictable ways, the need for consumer insights never ends.

 

Election Day is the moment of truth for the Four P’s: presidential aspirants, political parties, pollsters, and of course, the American public.

 

As Mark Ambinder of the publication The Week notes, today’s pollsters face strong head winds as they try to bring their cargo of voter-intention data safely into harbor by accurately predicting the actual election results. Any polls that run aground will face an embarrassing public reckoning, and probably a close inquiry into what went wrong.

 

Here are some insights from Ambinder and from Pew Research Center white papers from 2012 and 2016 that focus on how the changing landscape for telephone surveys is impacting political polling (and opinion surveys in general):

• Americans’ willingness to answer pollsters’ questions on politics (or, for that matter, any topic) has fallen “dramatically,” from 36% in 1997 to 9% in 2012, according to Pew. Among cell phone participants, the response rate was just 7%.

•  Consequently, Pew noted, “greater effort and expense are required to achieve even the diminished response rates of today.”

• Half of American households don't have landlines, making them harder to reach for the telephone polls that are standard for presidential pollsters. And, per the Week, “the younger you are, the less likely you are to have ever used a telephone with a cord attached to it.”

• This suggests that polling will face ever greater challenges as we go deeper into the smartphone era. The Millennials who’ve come of age with diminished (if any) connections to landlines will account for an increasingly large slice of the electorate for decades to come. The oldest members of Gen Z, for whom landlines are even more alien, will be eligible to vote in the 2018 midterm election.

• Noting that more than 90% of U.S. adults now have mobile phones, Pew has responded by going to extra lengths to reach them: in its 2015 “Survey on Government,” the balance of respondents was 65% cellphone interviewees, and 35% via landline. Pew sees “an impending transition to 100% cellphone surveys,” even though they cost 30% to 50% more than the no-longer-representative landline method.

• Pew says it takes “high-effort surveys” to land more of those necessary mobile interviews. That includes hiring “elite interviewers” who are experienced and adept at persuading reluctant contacts to take part, and paying cash incentives of as much as $20 per respondent.

• But there are still enormous challenges in establishing a truly representative polling sample. As The Week puts it, “it's much easier to get certain demographic groups to respond to a pollster's telephone call, regardless of the circumstance. If you're a white woman over the age of 50, you’re more likely to respond to a pollster than if you are black, or Hispanic, or a millennial. Pollsters try to control for this in their weighting, but their sample sizes [for the under-represented groups] are often so small that tiny changes compound error rates….every interpolation creates additional room for error.”

• On top of everything else, Ambinder notes, when a race is particularly close, heated, and impacted by volatile events, as Clinton vs. Trump has been, an extra degree of unpredictability can emerge: “If your candidate has a bad news cycle, you aren't as likely to be as enthusiastic about your vote, and you're less likely to respond to a pollster, or to be honest with a pollster about your partisan or ideological affinities.”

So will the head winds election pollsters face turn out to be hurricane-force gales that blow their predictions onto the shoals of inaccuracy? Soon you’ll know which of the polls have safely passed the big test, and which will have some explaining to do. And you’ll see whether one of the upshots of this unprecedentedly strange, strained presidential election will be an intense re-examination of political polling methods.

 

It already has carved its place among the legendary moments in American sports history: last week’s epic World Series Game 7 was saturated with drama as the Chicago Cubs overcame not only the Cleveland Indians, but 108 years of bad breaks and ineptitude to emerge as Major League Baseball’s champ for the first time since 1908.

 

Drama junkies now can turn from home runs to home technology as Amazon and Google square off to see who’ll be the champ in an intensifying competition to see whose smart speaker is smarter. Can Google Home, which debuted over the weekend, outscore Amazon’s Echo?

 

The New York Times did an interesting comparative evaluation to see who has the early advantage as the two technology titans position their smart devices on the playing field of innovation. Writer Brian Chin’s first take on the action suggests that this one could be a close, dramatic contest that will likely keep software engineers and marketers on both sides working into extra innings.

 

 

It's been 295 years since the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving feast in Salem, Massachusetts. That day’s agenda of gratitude and fellowship will never change. But in the smartphone era, new technology dovetails with old traditions. It's giving us new work-arounds for familiar holiday season hassles. 

• The trip: over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go – but now we're equipped with GPS guidance and driving directions apps to keep us from getting lost or snarled in traffic.
• The entertainment: no more tug of war over the remote; a screen in every hand means a program for every taste.
• The meal: digital home cooking site Epicurious has a new app this season that houses a library of more than 35,000 recipes, plus cooking videos, including a series on Thanksgiving dishes that require exactly three ingredients. Leftovers become opportunities. 
• Thinking of absent friends: video phone calls and posting pictures and videos have made "the next-best thing to being there" much better -- never out of sight means never out of mind. 
• Next-day shopping frenzy: if you get a thrill from lining up at the door before dawn, go for it. Some of us prefer browsing the virtual aisles in a bathrobe and slippers.
• The flip side of impulse buying: is impulse giving. A good deed in keeping with the season is just a tap or three away. 

Find Out with App Tracking

 

 

Halloween is scary fun, but the scary aspects of online panels are just plain scary.

 

Just ask Count App-ula (pictured), who came to our office on Halloween to announce that only knowledge -- and advanced,  all-mobile methodology -- will empower us to stop the threat before it's too late. Consider yourself warned against these common tactics of the monsters who lurk in the hidden, dimly-lit, ominously non-transparent recesses of online panels:

 

The  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” Effect

 

As in the classic sci-fi/horror films (we recommend both the 1956 and 1978 versions), authentically human consumers are replaced by manufactured “pod people” who replicate actual, thinking survey respondents.

 

In the movies, the pod people spread confusion and paranoia en route to destroying the very idea of autonomous human thought and action. In online research, habitual, self-repeating survey takers sign up for dozens or scores of surveys and survey panels, infecting  data across multiple studies with mass-manufactured responses. Too much data coming from too few people is a hidden horror of online research. And for online methods, the only antidote is out of reach: a large, robust, engaged panel that could easily encompass all demographics. Lacking the antidote, online panel purveyors are forced to look the other way and tolerate pod people for the sake of filling survey quotas.

 

The Mad Robot-Scientist Conspiracy

 

A technically gifted mastermind creates a robot army that swarms the online data universe, turning it into an unreliable mess. This is no fantasy: savvy code-writers can unleash software robots that create multiple email accounts so they can receive multiple email invitations and take multiple online surveys. Questionnaires answered by robots pour multiple rewards into their masters' accounts while injecting toxic data into online studies. Insights turn into insanity. It's downright inhuman.

 

The Zombie Apocalypse

 

Robots and survey-taking pod-people churn out so much brainless-replicant data that online market research stops matching observable reality and falls under suspicion. Clients begin to wonder whether the data they're getting has been infected to the point where it's undermining instead of informing sound, fact-based business decision-making. 

 

Yes, folks, it looks as if we're in for a very dark and tragic ending....But wait!  

 

All-Mobile Rescue Unit Saves the Day

 

Pod people, robots and zombies wreak havoc on online data, but they cower at the sight of a smartphone. That’s because smartphone owners who’ve downloaded a proprietary market research app – MFour’s Surveys on the Go®, for example (in fact, it's the only survey app whose panel is mobile-only)  – can’t be turned into pod-like replicas of themselves. Nor can they unleash robots to profitably game the system and bring down a study’s reliability. 

 

The Saving Power of in-App Surveys

 

The survey app is a secure environment that banishes Bots and detects body snatchers before they can invade. Unlike email accounts, which are easily multiplied by a single greedy individual or a bot, smartphones correspond one-to-one with a single, individual, flesh-and-blood owner. For further verification, each phone has a unique, identifying code and can be pinpointed with GPS location.

 

MFour/Surveys on the Go® has a variety of ways to verify panelists' identities, including sign-ins through their Facebook accounts, payouts through PayPal, and log-ins using fingerprint validation. All are reliable markers of individual personhood and earnest intent.

 

Another advanced safeguard is Demographic Remembering – which can detect whether respondent's answers from survey to survey include inconsistencies that signal an attempt at impersonation or duplication. 

 

Perhaps most important, there's no mysterious cloak of gloomy night and graveyard mist enshrouding an all-mobile panel if it's carefully recruited and highly engaged. The proof that its members do their own thinking and answering is on display in the bright daylight where apps are downloaded: Apple's App Store and Google Play. There, Surveys on the Go® has received tens of thousands of overwhelmingly positive, unsolicited comments and ratings from people who sound off as individuals about the experience they've had as survey-takers.

 

You can tell from their comments that our panelists are human and alive and individual -- and that they care about a good experience and appreciate that a good experience is exactly what they get. A panel that's in it for the engagement as well as a reward is verifiably human. Pod people and robots and zombies don't care, and they won't reciprocate with an honest effort to share what they think, do and feel. Our engaged panel of more than a million demographically representative active panelists give your research the verifiably human element that makes it valid and useful.

 

As Count App-ula says:  

 

“Zombies and robots are taking online surveys. Mobile doesn’t allow that. It’s all fresh blood.”

 

 

As the market research industry tries to get its collective head around mobile research, nobody has a better sense of what it’s going through than MFour’s Solutions team. And there’s nobody better qualified to help.

 

These are experts who educate clients and prospective clients about what advanced mobile research can achieve (by “clients and prospective clients,” we mean anyone who has a professional stake in obtaining consumer data that will generate insights into how today’s smartphone-loving public thinks and acts when it comes to shopping and buying).

 

The solutions staff’s job is to show researchers how MFour’s wide-ranging products and services can be individualized to tackle each research challenge that needs a solution.

 

Sometimes, our reps have to help MR professionals unlearn what they know about generic “mobile” before they can take the necessary next step of learning about the benefits of advanced, state-of-the-art mobile. They ain’t the same animal.

 

Andreas Hoelting, an MFour Solutions Development Representative, recently had an illuminating exchange with a prospective client who we’ll call Stan.

 

After several emails went unreturned, Andreas managed to make contact. Stan said he had read one of them, but let the chance to learn more about mobile research pass because he already “knew” that mobile surveys “have to be kept short” – and that wasn’t going to help him with the complex studies he needed to field.

 

That’s hardly surprising: “mobile = short” has become the conventional wisdom. Here’s one example published in the November, 2015 edition of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review:

 

“Participants completing mobile research have, on average, a significantly shorter attention span than those using desktop devices….. a long survey delivered on mobile will suffer high dropout rates due to a lack of engagement, but the same survey delivered on a desktop offers space for detailed, reflective feedback.”

 

Stan clearly had read this or something like it, or had absorbed the idea of “mobile = short” in conversations with fellow MR pros who’d received the same impression, either from reading, from conference presentations, or from direct experience with what they thought was a mobile study.

 

Andreas was able to explain that Stan had it exactly right – the kind of mobile research he’d heard about does need to be kept short. But it’s not the kind of mobile you should buy. We think of it as “quick fix” mobile – designed as a jerry-rigged, technologically lethargic attempted fix for the escalating failure of online surveys to reach a public that increasingly and overwhelmingly has embraced smartphones.

 

The quick fix mobile response is to cram a traditional survey designed to be taken on a laptop or desktop computer onto a smartphone screen, then hope that whoever tries to respond will put up with the messy user experience long enough to answer a few questions. With a quick-fix mobile approach, five minutes, tops, seems about right. 

 

Others claim they’ve raised the bar by achieving “mobile optimization.” It may look better on the screen, but there’s nothing optimal about it. Panelists still have to open and click on an email invitation – which competes with the zillion other messages stuffed into their inboxes, most of them unwanted. Those who do click are connected to a website where the survey is housed.

 

Then the survey begins. Technologically, it’s an inelegant and inefficient game of ping pong, with the website sending a question and the respondent sending back an answer. Each exchange is a separate, back-and-forth transaction that has to be repeated over and over until the survey is done.

 

The trouble is that if the panelist’s internet connection becomes slow or the signal drops out – and who hasn’t been through that? – the process will collapse. The researcher ends up not only losing a complete, but loses the ongoing help of the respondent – who will take out his or her frustration by sending the next email survey invitation straight to trash.

 

Does this sound "optimized" to you?

 

Andreas quickly explained all this  (thankfully, it’s easier to talk a client through it than put it in writing, so thanks for bearing with your faithful blogger). And then he said the magic words: “native app.”

 

Stan hadn’t heard the term, but by now he was curious to see where Andreas was going with this explanation of how “all mobile is not created equal” and “not all mobile surveys need to be short.”

 

Long story short: Andreas walked Stan through how MFour’s surveys are conducted.

 

• They take place inside a proprietary app – Surveys on the Go® – that more than a million engaged active panelists have downloaded to their smartphones.
• Those burdensome email notifications are cut out of the equation.
• Instead, panelists welcome push notifications telling them of a survey opportunity.
• Welcome, because, after all, they’ve downloaded the app and know how it works (Andreas mentioned SOTG’s unsolicited rating of five stars at the Apple Store and more than four out of five at Google Play -- both the highest ratings for a survey app).
• No internet connection needed – “native” means the app instantly embeds the entire survey into the phone.
• The panelist can answer offline, at his or her convenience.
• The result is a completion rate of more than 90% for surveys with LOI of 20 minutes or more, with a drop-off of just 6.5%. 

 

What makes state-of-the-art mobile so well-suited to long game studies and not just to quick-hit surveys? Like all smartphone users, research panelists expect smooth functionality on their devices, and will stay engaged when they get it. But they'll discard  any app that fails to deliver, as surely as they'll keep tapping on those that provide rewarding experiences. 

 

Again, Andreas explained all this quickly, and Stan quickly got it. The conversation could now turn to Stan’s specific research needs, which had to do with in-store product and packaging evaluations – tasks for which app-based research is ideally suited because of the phones’ photo and multimedia capabilities.

 

 If you’re like Stan and have only heard about short-LOI/short attention span mobile, we envy you – you’re about to learn some cool stuff about advanced, app-based, state-of-the-art mobile that solves problems and makes your professional life better. Andreas and his Solutions colleagues can tell you all about it.

 

To reach one of them,  just click here.

 

 

 

 

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

Whatever else you do, don't forget to check at the bottom for something to tickle your bones.

• New: Target Respondents By Carrier and OS
• AT&T's $85 Billion Bet on Mobile
• Why Good Panelist Experience Matters

And here's a Friday tune to put you in the Halloween spirit.