Todd Costello has joined the MFour Mobile Research team as a Senior Solutions Executive, continuing an expansion that will double the MFour staff to more than 100 in 2017. He is a 12-year veteran of market research, with broad experience in data collection, sales and client service.

Todd is president of the Marketing Research Assn.’s Southern California Chapter, having served previously as president of the Philadelphia and Atlanta-Southeast Chapters. At MFour he will reach out to new and established clients to understand their research needs, alert them to unique mobile research solutions, and provide service and consultation throughout a project. He comes to MFour after owning and operating his own data collection company, CMR Services.

Todd previously was a Senior Account Executive for Marketing Systems Group. He is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, with a degree in International Business & Marketing. When not spending free time with his wife and their year-old daughter, Todd can be found off the coast, fishing from his kayak and landing big ones that he loves to grill himself. Welcome aboard, Todd!

It's official: the need for businesses to be smart about smartphones is so obvious it now goes without saying.

Google announced recently that it is dropping the “mobile friendly” seal of approval that has been popping up in search results over the past two years to distinguish websites that work well on smartphones from those that hadn’t bothered to make their sites easy to read and navigate on mobile devices’ smaller screens.

In Google’s view, the campaign to optimize the smartphone experience by dangling the reward of a "mobile friendly" designation can be called off, because it has been fought and won. Google reported that 85% of all pages in mobile search results now qualify as mobile friendly. It’s no longer something to aspire to, but something that’s simply assumed. As Google put it, "we've seen the ecosystem evolve." The recalcitrant few who haven’t evolved by optimizing their content and user experience for mobile will continue to be penalized with lowered rankings in search results.

“The…search giant feels it is common knowledge that sites… will be friendlier to all devices,” MediaPost.com noted in its Mobile Insider newsletter.

What goes without saying in the realm of search results also should go without saying in the realm of market research. Lacking an effective, wholehearted strategy for mobile surveys will soon be a mark of backwardness almost too obvious to be worth pointing out.

For now, though, it does bear pointing out, so until the MR industry has come fully on board, MFour will keep talking about what it means to be mobile-research friendly.

 It’s not just fielding the same old surveys to smaller screens, and it’s not just picking any mobile system that presents itself. State-of-the-art mobile research is not a commodity, but an advanced specialty, and like any technology-driven specialty, it requires experience and single-minded focus. MFour has put all its effort and skill into mobile since 2011, when it began pioneering mobile research software and recruiting smartphone and tablet users to its unique, all-mobile Surveys on the Go® panel, which now numbers more than a million active members and continues to grow at the rate of more than 2,000 daily. 

Adopters of advanced smartphone-based research will harness the devices'  vast computing, multimedia, and geolocation capabilities, and the results will speak for themselves. Soon it will go without saying that advanced mobile research is the industry standard. You may not be quite there yet, but if you’re reading this, you’re already on the brink.

Most of us are used to letting Google guide us. This is no time to make an exception.

There’s nothing quite like books to exercise the brain, and Americans increasingly are using mobile devices to read them, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

This finding is one more nail in the coffin of a market research myth: that mobile devices aren’t suited to the longer, more complex surveys required for a deep dive into a research topic. People who’ll spend hours reading a book on a smartphone will surely spend 20 minutes answering a mobile questionnaire – if, like the book, the survey holds their interest and functions properly on the phone. We know it because we see it all the time.

Pew’s study, “Book Reading 2016,” offers some surprises – but the fact that book readers are gravitating toward mobile devices isn’t one of them. Mobile is “The Way We Live Now” – the title of a book by the prolific 19th century English novelist, Anthony Trollope, which you can read on a screen of your choosing.

One gratifying finding for people who don’t want to see every beloved tradition get kicked to the digital-age curb is that books with real bindings and pages are one legacy technology that’s holding its own. 65% of American adults reported having read at least one printed volume during the 12 months ending April 4 – a figure that has held stable since 2012.

But Pew researchers also found that more readers are integrating smartphones and tablets into their reading. Here are key findings about mobile book consumption:

• “While print remains at the center of the book-reading landscape as a whole, there has been a distinct shift in the e-book landscape over the last five years. Americans increasingly turn to multipurpose devices such as smartphones and tablet computers… “
•  “The share of...readers on tablets has more than tripled since 2011 (4% to 15%) and the number of readers on phones has more than doubled (5% to 13%) over that time…”
•  “Smartphones are playing an especially prominent role in the e-reading habits of certain demographic groups, such as non-whites and those who have not attended college.”

Laptops and desktops are not nearly as popular with book readers as mobile devices. Only 11% of Pew's respondents said they had read a book on a laptop or desktop during the past year -- compared to the 28% who’ve used smartphones or tablets.

Millennials, who are much more reachable for surveys on mobile devices than on personal computers, unsurprisingly are also more inclined than other groups to read books on their cherished smartphones or tablets. 37% of Pew's respondents In the 18-29 age group said they had  read a book on a mobile device (22% smartphone, 15% tablet). The 30-49 age bracket, which includes older Millennials, was close behind at 36%, divided equally between smartphones and tablets.

The implication for market research seems clear: people like mobile devices, and they'll give close attention and more than a few moments of their time to mobile surveys that engage them and are relevant to their lives as consumers. 

This isn’t just a hypothesis. Smartphone users’ willingness to stick with mobile surveys for 20 minutes or more is a fact MFour and its clients have confirmed repeatedly over many projects.  At that length of interview we expect response rates of 50%, and completion rates above 90%.

Results like this aren't automatic. The magic isn't intrinsic to mobile devices, just as the magic in a book isn't intrinsic to the paper and ink, or the pixels. It depends on human factors -- designing the best mobile survey software, recruiting and engaging a reliable and representative panel, and acquiring and applying the experience  that's needed to excel in applied technology and client service.

MFour has written the book on how to carry out mobile research. We’ve been pioneering and advancing these methods since 2011, when our Surveys on the Go® app debuted. We are to mobile market research what Gutenberg was to the printed text.

Now we’re delighted to have learned from Pew that reports of the traditional printed book’s death have been greatly exaggerated. It may be an old technology, but it still works. And now there's mobile reading on smartphones as a useful supplement.

The same can’t be said for traditional online market research. It no longer serves its purpose, the way a printed book does. It isn't being supplemented by mobile research. It’s being supplanted.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you jump into the Labor Day weekend. Whatever else you do, don't forget to check at the bottom for something to mobilize your spirits and get the weekend off to a festive start. 

MR Add-on Charges You Can Avoid

Need help? No sweat.

MR Needs to Fight the Right War

And here's a Friday tune to send you humming and smiling into a much-deserved long weekend.

History buffs will remember the Maginot Line.

It was a string of imposing fortifications the French built along their border with Germany during the 1930s. German forces had poured into France during World War I, and it took four years of brutal fighting on French soil to defeat them. The Maginot Line was built to ensure that this would never happen again.

What the French high command failed to anticipate was an end run executed at unprecedented speed with unprecedented military technology. Blitzing German forces flanked the Maginot Line in the early days of World War II, and France fell in a matter of weeks.

Now market research has its own Maginot Line. Like the one in France, it’s an impressive and righteously intended piece of defensive architecture that will have little effect because it has been built to fight the last war.

This new line of defense is a recently-announced system designed to protect researchers from buying bad internet sample. It aims to address an acknowledged crisis in MR – intensifying gaps in the quality, reliability and demographic reach of online panels. The program has a laudable goal -- to test and vet the panels that participating suppliers provide to the project's sponsor, a company that aggregates and brokers panels for research projects. It aims to help buyers become better-informed and more secure about what they’re getting, because they’ll be able to check the panel-quality ratings and rankings the system generates. It’s also designed to give suppliers a strong incentive to address any issues that are holding down their panels’ scores.

The concept makes sense. If it works as intended, it undeniably will be very helpful – in fighting the last war.

As recently as the late 2000s, such a quality-rating program for online panels would have mattered a great deal. At that point, personal computers still ruled. But that’s no longer the case. It’s the smartphone that now permeates our lives – and by all reckoning its domination will continue, in what we can confidently call the Smartphone Era.

People want to do their business and experience their pleasures on mobile. They want to be informed and entertained on mobile. They want to relate to friends and family on mobile. They want to be on mobile.

You can verify this just by looking around. But if you need harder evidence than what your eyes tell you, the Pew Research Center provides the numbers: 72% of American adults owned smartphones as of early this year – including 86% ages 18 to 29 and 83% ages 30 to 49. These are the prolific consumers, present and future, who are crucial for researchers to reach.

The process that undergirds online surveys is a throwback to ancient times – well, to a time before 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Online research calls for panelists to be notified by email, click on a link, and take a survey that’s housed on a website. It’s not a process that suits a smartphone-using public. Citizens of the smartphone era vastly prefer apps to web connections that can be fragile and data-consuming. Properly-designed survey apps will cache content, allowing respondents to answer questions offline. Mobile panelists receive push notifications -- the friendly doorbell ring of the smartphone era – rather than emails, which often are seen as annoyances to be ignored or quickly skimmed through and tossed out.

Again, the numbers bear this out: comScore’s report, “U.S. Cross Platform Future in Focus – 2016,” found that by the end of 2015, mobile apps accounted for 56% of Americans’ engagement with digital media, measured by time spent on all devices combined. Factoring in web connections as well as apps, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Americans’ time with digital media.

Given these facts, the stark logic in market research comes down to this:

• The bedrock basis of this industry is its ability to communicate with a representative slice of the public. 
• Today’s public overwhelmingly presents itself on smartphones and occupies itself with smartphones.
• Therefore: Is there any reason to believe that taking surveys is the one form of communication and information exchange that people would rather not conduct on mobile?

It’s a mistake, however, to make a simple blanket statement that surveys targeted to mobile devices will solve the panel crisis. The key is using an advanced mobile approach rather than one that's been quickly slapped together in order to catch up.

It takes special software engineering and survey-design work to make questionnaires display and function well on smartphones. The look must be clean, the content instantly understandable. The survey can’t slow the respondent down or let boredom seep in. It must be the kind of glitch-free experience that smartphone users expect and demand from everything that’s on their devices.

It almost goes without saying that, given the public’s obvious preferences, a quality mobile survey experience will attract and engage panelists in numbers that now elude online research.

But can anything comparable to the quality checking that’s now being advocated for online surveys be duplicated for mobile research?

It’s already being done, in the most natural way: mobile survey apps come with a built-in, completely public quality control system. They’re downloaded from the App Store (for iOS users) and Google Play (for Android). These are among the most prominent storefronts on the digital town square, and each provides a public bulletin board where people who use an app are free to comment on it and rate their experiences for all to see. To get a good idea of a survey app’s functionality and its panel’s satisfaction and engagement, researchers need only do what they’re best at – listen to a slice of the public.

We’re not in a position to evaluate how well the new project to rate online panel quality will fulfill its aim. All we can say is that it’s aiming at the wrong target. It’s asking market research to shoot arrows into the past, where even a bullseye won’t help it succeed in the present, or position it to prosper in the future.

The French put a lot of thought, effort and expense into the Maginot Line. It may have been the strongest bulwark the world has ever known. And it would have worked perfectly – if only time and technology had stood still.

What’s more annoying than having to pay for stuff you don’t want and don’t need?

• Cable channels you don’t watch

• Ticket “convenience charges” that have nothing to do with convenience

• MR interviews that terminate but still cost you money

• Suspect data from unreliable respondents

MFour can’t help you with the cable company or the ticket sellers, but it’s our business to make sure you get full value for your research dollar – and that a research rip-off never happens.

• We don’t charge for terminated interviews. When you say you need 200 successfully completed, quality interviews, we make sure that’s exactly what you get.

• You come to us for clean data, and clean data is all you pay for. We examine every interview, toss out the bad, and only charge for answers that generate insights.

At MFour, the job isn’t just building better research. It’s building up an industry by setting a better standard.

• Quality assurance: advice on phrasing questions and industry best practices to get the best insights
• Live support: connect with a specialist to help you build your survey and answer any questions
• Live data cleaning: we remove flawed responses as they come in — you only pay for successful interviews

Sabrina Santos has joined MFour’s team as Administrative Assistant, with a wide range of responsibilities supporting senior management and staff. Sabrina has a degree in marketing management from Biola University and was previously an assistant manager and senior buyer for Crossroads Trading Co., a fashion retailer and exchange. Welcome aboard, Sabrina!