When it comes to MFour's signature Surveys on the Go® smartphone app, an enjoyable user experience is always uppermost in our mind.

So naturally we were struck by a fascinating article in the New Yorker about the original user experience for survey-takers. It shows how a form of survey was in circulation long before the advent of formal market-research questionnaires in the early 1900s – and that it was done just for fun, as a kind of parlor game.

Some very famous names played along during the 1800s, providing intriguing information about themselves.

New Yorker contributor Evan Kindley traces how people began passing around “confession albums” to friends and acquaintances, containing a series of questions about themselves and their views on life:

A fashionable parlor game originating among the Victorian literate classes, the “confession album”... presented a formulaic set of queries on each page—“What is your distinguishing characteristic,” for instance, or “What virtue do you most esteem?” The album’s owner would pass the volume around among her friends, collecting their comments as a kind of souvenir…” 

Among those who obliged, Kindley writes, were Karl Marx, Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, Oscar Wilde (author of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Kindley focuses particularly on a questionnaire filled out in 1886 by a 14-year-old Marcel Proust, who would grow up to be a leading pioneer of literary modernism with “In Search of Lost Time,” his epic series of seven novels published between 1913 and 1927.

“The Proust Questionnaire,” as it came to be known, resurfaced publicly in 1924, by which time Proust was two years dead, and very famous. His answers as a teenager were thought to foreshadow attitudes and ideas that were the germ of his great literary career and its themes.

Kindley, a Los Angeles writer who will delve further into the phenomenon in an upcoming book called “Questionnaire,” notes that the Proust Questionnaire’s renown gave rise to the common pop culture practice of publishing questionnaires filled out by famous people, including Vanity Fair magazine’s ongoing “Proust Questionnaire” feature.

Of course, the questionnaires that market researchers create and analyze are no parlor game. They’re finely-honed tools for collecting consumer data to inform business decisions that can affect a company’s fortunes and reverberate throughout the economy.

Still, we enjoy the thought that our enterprise is at least partly rooted  in something done strictly for the fun of it. In the case of Proust, the “parlor game” produced answers that generated what we in market research always strive for: useful insights.

But fun still counts. By making surveys easy and enjoyable  (as reflected in its consistent 4.5-star rating out of 5 in the App Store and Google Play), Surveys on the Go®  keeps MFour's million-member all-mobile active panel engaged. From that springs our ability to serve our clients' need for fast, validated and demographically representative data.

There’s nothing like a good point/counterpoint debate, and MFour cofounder and CEO Chris St. Hilaire makes his point about the capabilities of mobile research loud and clear in today’s bimonthly e-newsletter from Quirks’ Marketing Research Media.

Chris’s essay is a rejoinder to an article in the June edition of Quirk’s magazine, in which Australian researcher Philip Derham conducted a study of survey respondents from Down Under and found that many of them disliked taking surveys on their smartphones because of problems such as dropped signals that made it frustrating and often impossible to complete the questions.

Click here for Chris's full response published by Quirk's -- and for a further comment from Derham that we appreciate.

Our MFour leader (pictured) spells out the differences between bad mobile methods that led to the Australian study's dismal findings for mobile surveys, and the very different state-of-the-art methods and technologies that MFour deploys for its clients.

“Technologies and panel-recruitment methods can differ radically between flawed and optimal approaches, yet all are lumped in the same `mobile’ category,’” Chris observes. “There is, in fact, good mobile and bad mobile, and the study published in Quirk’s uncovers precisely what’s wrong with the bad stuff.”

In his comment following up on Chris's essay, Derham writes that state of the art mobile technology is not yet available to market researchers in Australia, but "I appreciate the discussion and the exchange of ideas that enables our industry to strengthen the range of tools and techniques available for us all, so we can choose the most appropriate, not just the one someone  has available."

“All roads lead to Rome” was a proud boast about economic power that resounded through the ancient world.

Today’s economic reality is that all paths lead to purchase – but the question is how to get shoppers to beat a path to one’s own door – whether it’s an eCommerce portal or a bricks-and-mortar store. The roads to Rome were many; the paths to sales today are all but infinite. This is an immense business opportunity – but also a huge challenge.

Attendees at next week’s OmniShopper conference in Chicago will be looking for answers about how to nudge today’s shoppers in directions their companies or research clients want them to go. Which is why MFour is sending a two-man delegation. We’ll be there to help attendees take an all-mobile path to research and retail success by gleaning essential data and insights showing what shoppers want and how they decide to buy.

Senior Solutions Executives Alex Colao (far left) and Scott Worthge will be at OmniShopper to talk about the all-encompassing reality of today’s commerce – that we’re living in a Smartphone Empire. Users’ mobile devices are taking them where they want to go electronically, and shaping their shopping behavior along with everything else.

MFour and its Surveys on the Go® proprietary app are the best way to get in touch with the new empire’s citizens to get the answers you need.

Visit Alex and Scott at MFour’s exhibit and they’ll tell you about:

• How our panel of more than a million mobile users can generate the fast, validated and demographically representative data researchers need.

• How our superior, extra-accurate Geo-location capabilities will take you right to the point of purchase throughout the U.S., pushing surveys to the consumers you want at the locations you need, at the moment it matters most.

• How you can segment and target our panel by the apps its members use, and by the shopping sites they’ve visited.

Today’s retailers already are awash in data they’ve collected about their customers –more of it than they can sift through productively. MFour’s role is to help turn that data into a more precise guide to following up with the questions you still need answered.

“We give brands and researchers the ability to find out what they don’t know” amid the data glut, says Alex. “We put them in touch. With people shopping in all these different ways, the mobile phone is a big player in how they do it. If you want to know how mobile users are shopping, what better way than to survey them while they're shopping? With our smartphone panel, MFour can make it happen."

So if you’re heading to OmniShopper, look for the MFour green in the exhibit area and stop by for a friendly and informative chat. Whatever research road you’re traveling, Alex and Scott will tell you how accessing the state-of-the art in mobile capabilities will get you where you want to go.

We’ve been noting regularly that the market research industry faces a potentially disastrous problem because it no longer can trust obsolete panel-recruitment methods to find the numbers and types of respondents needed to produce reliable survey data.

And we’ve been emphasizing that the answer is state-of-the art, all-mobile research. MFour’s clients harness the special capabilities of smartphones for solutions at both ends of the research equation: engaging a reliable and effective panel, and getting ironclad data from them using a special mobile survey app and advanced Geo-location technology.

Now comes word from Las Vegas about a case in which the panel problem turned into a nightmare and generated a fascinating lawsuit. It ended with a judge’s ruling against a company that was supposed to recruit respondents for a research firm’s casino-related study, but allegedly resorted to dishonest means to fill out the panel (thanks to MRWeb’s Daily Research News for publishing the first report).

A Research Nightmare: “Gross misrepresentation”

Here’s how it went down, according to court records and news releases from James Industry Research Group (JIR), which successfully sued for damages.

Las Vegas-based JIR was engaged by a slot machine manufacturer to oversee a “players test” of its gaming equipment by a panel of casino gamblers. JIR hired another Nevada company, ACR Business Resources, to recruit the 40 respondents. 

JIR staff members became suspicious as they tried to contact the 40 recruits by phone as part of a routine validation process. They found that screening criteria hadn’t been followed. A JIR news release about the case said that it suspected “falsification” and “gross misrepresentation of respondent data.” It fired ACR and recruited a new panel on its own.

Jim James, the JIR President, said he sued more on principle than to recoup the cost of ACR’s failure.

“Cheating is wrong,” James said. “We’ve seen this type of data fabrication previously….When companies within our industry operate without data integrity, it’s a detriment to all of us.”

JIR sued for $5,531 in a small claims court in Henderson, NV., according to court records; ACR and its principal, Carol Greco, countersued for a similar amount. Judge Rodney Burr found in favor of JIR and awarded it a $2,606 judgment, plus $181 in court costs. In JIR’s recent announcement of the case’s outcome, the victorious James offered to provide a “roadmap for how we presented our case” to other market researchers who’ve been burned by data fabrication or falsification issues and want to file claims.

MFour applauds James and his company for insisting on honest research and congratulates them for winning redress.

All-Mobile Panel Recruitment is No Gamble

We’d also like to point the way for research firms and corporate consumer research departments to immunize themselves against panel recruitment that’s fraudulent, or even merely flawed: the all-mobile approach pioneered by MFour, which includes automatic validation of panelists and their responses. We’ve even deployed it on the gambling strip in Las Vegas.

 “With GPS technology inherent in mobile devices, we know when and how often respondents visit casinos,” said Michael Smith, MFour’s Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel. “Using this trusted validation technique, we’ve accomplished multiple studies” for casino industry clients.

The most recent one, Smith said, involved “monitoring out-of-towners’ visits to six separate casinos on the strip. We wanted to know what drew them to these major casinos, how often, and for how long.”

Recruiting the right panel to receive the right questions at the right time doesn’t have to be a gamble – even in the heart of Las Vegas. Market researchers just need to know that state-of-the-art mobile is the way to place their bets.

MFour Mobile Research welcomes a new member to its Operations team, continuing the rapid expansion that will double the company’s size from about 50 employees early this year to more than 100 by early 2017.

Project Manager Spencer Hall will help push the continuing advancement of MFour’s services and capabilities as it carries out state-of-the art, all-mobile survey-based research for clients who include leading market research firms, corporations and brands.

Spencer previously did consumer and market research for Modern AlkaMe, designer of a digital platform for calibrating dietary supplement regimes according to data collected from users’ biometric devices. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from California State University, Long Beach.

MFour made a big bet at start of this decade that mobile technology would revolutionize consumer surveys, just as it would dominate other realms in communications and information exchange. Everything that’s happened since has confirmed that wager.

More evidence of mobile’s impact on society arrives in the Pew Research Center’s recently-released report on the “State of the News Media 2016.”

Tracking statistics from 110 leading U.S. media outlets, the report found that “mobile traffic continues to gain prominence over desktop traffic across media sectors.” In 2015, the year studied, 99 of those 110 sites received more visits from mobile devices than any other method of access.

• Newspapers: of the 50 top newspaper websites, all but six drew more unique visitors on mobile than on desktops (including laptops, since Pew classifies all personal computers as desktops).

• News magazines: nine of 12 in the study had more visits from mobile users than PC users.

• National television outlet websites: all eight sites in the study had more mobile visitors.

• Digital-only news publications (Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Salon, etc.): 38 of 40 had more mobile visitors.

Probing a bit deeper, Pew found that of the 40 digital-only news organizations it studied, 33 saw gains in mobile traffic over the previous year, while 27 experienced drops in visits via personal computers. The mobile increases were large (defined as 10% or more) for 28 of the sites. Twenty-three digital news sites had large declines in PC traffic.

What does this mean for the market research industry as it grapples with whether to move from still-prevalent but increasingly outdated online/PC methods to new mobile opportunities?

Good news if it embraces the accelerating shift to mobile that the Pew Center documents in the media, and which MFour epitomizes in the realm of market research.  Bad news if it doesn’t.

“After all…tomorrow is another day,” is probably the most famous line ever uttered by a fictitious person in Atlanta -- Scarlett O’Hara, in her tearful finale in “Gone With the Wind.”

MFour’s representatives to the recent IIeX market research conference in Atlanta say they heard something similar from speakers who were trying to pitch outdated online panel methods to the conferees.

By now it’s pretty clear that online methods belong to yesterday, and tomorrow brings them closer to their inevitable eclipse by the advanced, state-of-the-art mobile research that MFour offers.

Ours reps’ takeaway from IIeX is that the market research industry increasingly grasps that fact. People are looking for something better than increasingly ineffective online panels that are dismal on demographics and snail-like in data-acquisition. It’s sinking in that the only smart and sensible choice is to reach respondents where they live – on their smartphones, instead of on the laptops and PCs where fewer and fewer people are hanging out to take consumer surveys. 

At IIeX, said Andrew Fang, MFour’s Vice President of Sales, the idea that online panels remain effective continued to circulate in various presentations. But they seemed to be gaining less traction. Evidence is mounting that new approaches are needed – witness  the most recent Greenbook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report, which pointedly and emphatically said that panel-quality problems have reached crisis proportions and need to be addressed with a sense of innovation and openness to new and better methods.

Andrew and Jeannette Ceballos, the MFour Senior Sales Executive who joined him in Atlanta, said that the market research clients who came by our company’s exhibit were clearly beginning to understand the importance of jumping aboard mobile, and wanted to learn more.

“It was so much better” than at past conferences, Andrew said. He no longer needed to explain what mobile research is, but spent his time talking to visitors who already knew about mobile methods when the conversations began, and were able to ask informed questions about MFour’s specific approach.

Andrew said that presentations of MFourDIY, the first all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building tool, went over especially well.

“Everyone looked at our DIY platform and said, `You can do things with it that you can’t do with other platforms,’” he recalled. “They said they liked it because of its complex abilities, and because it’s intuitive and easy to program.”

We can tell you a lot more as we move farther on down the market research conference trail. MFour will have representatives at OmniShopper, July 11-13 in Chicago, and MRMW North America, July 18-19 in Fort Worth, Texas.

Senior Solutions Executives Alex Colao and Scott Worthge will be our  men in Chicago; in Fort Worth we’ll be giving a how-to workshop on MFourDIY, with DIY Product Manager Andreas Hoelting and Sales V.P. Fang presiding.

In the meantime, if anybody tries to persuade you that online research has a future, we invite you to borrow two other famous sayings from “Gone With the Wind.”

Just tell them “Fiddle-dee-dee!” and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Continuing its rapid expansion, MFour Mobile Research, Inc., has hired Rebecca Young as Project Manager for MFourDIY, the first all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building tool.

Rebecca is helping clients take full advantage of the recently-launched MFourDIY, where users access highly-sophisticated research features, while enjoying cost-effective design functions that are simple and intuitive to use. Rebecca previously worked as an associate buyer for Houzz, an online resource for home-design and home-improvement companies and their prospective clients. She is a graduate of Chapman University who loves birds and plays the piano.

MFour began pioneering all-mobile research in 2011 when it launched Surveys on the Go®, the first app for consumer surveys conducted solely on smartphones and other mobile devices. The Irvine, CA-based MFour recently announced plans to double its staff to more than 100 by early 2017.

MFour Mobile Research, Inc. has added two new software engineers to its Labs & Engineering department in a move that will increase automation and make delivery of data to clients even faster and more efficient.

One of the assignments new hires Brandon Davis and Dennis Nguyen will tackle will be bringing more automation – and therefore more speed – to data transfers, said Chris Monahan, MFour’s Chief Technology Officer.

The goal, Monahan said, “is giving clients access to the data even sooner” as it comes in from respondents in MFour’s million-member active panel – the nation’s only panel that receives and responds to surveys solely on mobile devices.

Brandon arrives from Entrepreneur, Inc., where he devised software that improved content-production functions and optimized digital display of Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously he was at Luxion, Inc., where his duties included developing new features for its Cloud service, KeyShot Cloud.

Dennis comes to MFour from LU Electric, where he was a software developer working on a variety of project management and internal information processing functions. Dennis has a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles.

There, while doing Bioinformatics research, he realized he had a passion for the tech and software-creation aspects of his work. Now Dennis will apply his distinctive background to creating market research software.

Brandon and Dennis are part of an ongoing expansion that will double MFour’s full-time staff to more than 100 by early 2017.

With its ongoing expansion continuing apace, MFour Mobile Research, Inc., announces the hiring of Aaron Siefker and Lily Ingrassia. Siefker, a solutions executive, will reach out to inform prospective new clients about the advantages of MFour’s all-mobile surveys, and Ingrassia, an account executive, will make sure clients get top service and results when they field research projects with MFour.

Aaron turned his passion for soccer – he was a midfielder at Azusa Pacific University – into an entrepreneurial endeavor by founding GOALSHOT, a designer of soccer-training equipment that’s licensed internationally. Now he’ll help MFour score new clients and realize its goal of defining and dominating mobile research. Aaron earned two degrees at Azusa Pacific, a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in education.

Lily has a sports industry background, too – she’s worked in marketing for the International Surfing Assn., and also for IMAX Corporation in Santa Monica. She is finishing her coursework as a senior in marketing and international business at the University of San Diego.

Aaron and Lily are part of a hiring wave that will double MFour’s staff to more than a hundred by early next year.