Santa Claus came to MFour shortly after last year's Christmas season to solve his biggest consumer satisfaction problem: chronic annual shortages of the hottest toys.

His elves' off-target toy production had been based on recommendations from online market researchers who relied on multi-sourced, third-party data to draw inferences about consumer preferences. Flawed data and off-target forecasting led to wasted effort in Santa's Workshop and unwanted gifts under trees. Many very "nice" children were spending Christmas morning wondering whether Santa had categorized them as "naughty," and therefore undeserving of their preferred gifts. 

Santa came to MFour for a solution. The recommendation was Digital Brand Tracking. This groundbreaking new capability lets clients observe consumers' shopping and buying activities on Amazon, a key indicator of their interests and preferences. With Digital Brand Tracking, Santa was able to observe what real, validated first-party consumers were searching for online. Then he followed up with real-time mobile surveys to get fresh, Point-of-Emotion^® insights into the presents they want. And thanks to constant tracking, Santa can continue to watch for consumer trends right up to Christmas Eve, and beyond.  

“I already know who’s been bad or good, but some of the good kids were getting toys they didn't want," Santa said. "Thanks to MFour, the elves and I have eliminated wasted production of unwanted goods and refocused on items that will spread comfort and joy. Now I can confidently promise on-time production and delivery of the toys children actually love. It's really something to Ho-Ho-Ho about!"

Digital Behavior Tracking isn’t just for Santa. Businesses of all sizes can leverage this new solution from MFour for greater insight and understanding of validated, first-party consumer behavior. Don’t rely on stated data to get the answers you need. Take the power of observed shopper behavior and combine it with real-time surveys of profiled, demographically representative respondents to ensure the highest-quality consumer data. To learn more about this transformative technology and its uses, please complete the form below.

Retailers’ and product manufacturers’ bottom lines hang in the balance on Black Friday. We followed validated, first-party consumers from store to store during their buying journeys on the big day, and here’s some of what we discovered:

• Consumers did their part for retailers by going bargain-hunting instead of going to the gym.
• With their refrigerators stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers, they understandably avoided grocery aisles.
• Faced with those leftovers at home, they were not entirely averse to eating out, especially at chains commonly located in shopping malls.
• However, as KFC can attest, quick-serve meals featuring poultry with biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy can be a hard sell the day after Thanksgiving.

Here are some highlights that can be observed on MFour’s consumer-journey visualization tool, Path-2-Purchase^® Platform. It continuously tracks the daily location visits of 2.5 million first-party U.S. consumers who have downloaded the Surveys On The Go^® mobile research app. Members doubly opt in to allow location tracking via their smartphones across 12.5 million locations, enabling them to receive in-store and after-visit survey opportunities for location-based research.

The figures compare observed retail visits on Black Friday, Nov. 23, with the average number of visits to each retailer or restaurant over the five previous Fridays from Oct. 19 to Nov. 16.

• About those absences from the gym: top fitness chains experienced drop-offs of 20% (at Anytime Fitness) to 66% (at Equinox). LA Fitness was in the middle with a 38% decrease in foot traffic.

Instead, shoppers flocked to the stores en masse, and many retailers saw foot traffic soar by factors of two, three, four and five over their recent Friday averages. However, to see those results you will have to wait for in our 2018 Black Friday Study webinar on December 12th at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern (which you can register for below). In the meantime, here are some other insights we gleaned from Black Friday:

• It was a more normal Friday at club stores: Costco saw a 12% increase and Sam’s Club a 10% boost.

• If working off calories in a gym wasn’t on most consumers’ agendas, they were certainly thinking about getting active in the future: Dick’s Sporting Goods boosted its foot traffic 483% above recent Friday norms, and Bass Pro Shops enjoyed a 474% upsurge.

• It was generally a down Friday for quick-serve restaurants, with Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Subway off 13% to 19% from their recent norms.

• But some restaurants that typically are inside or in close proximity to malls succeeded in refilling stomachs that had gotten over their Thanksgiving heroics. Johnny Rockets (278%), Cinnabon (147%), Sbarro (89%) and The Cheesecake Factory (55%) were busier than their usual Friday.

• And chicken didn’t seem quite so alluring as usual after a day of poultry overload. KFC’s foot traffic was down 41% and Chick-fil-A was off 19% from recent Friday averages.

• Grocery stores were down, with Albertsons, Kroger and Winn-Dixie stores averaging an aggregate slacking off of 31% from their recent Friday norms.

While it’s well worth targeting, tracking and observing demographically profiled consumers’ visitation patterns, there’s more to be done to understand their motivations and their shopping experiences. The key is being able to locate and survey them in real time, during or just after a shopping visit. That will be the subject of “Black Friday Consumer Study – the `Why’ Behind the Buy,” a webinar MFour is offering Wednesday, Dec. 12 at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern. To sign up, just complete the form below.

The good news for advertising on social media is that a massive audience gathers there. The bad news is that any given social media ad is a small raft of messaging in a limitless ocean of content. To increase your social ads’ chances of being discovered - and lifting consumers’ brand and product awareness and intent to buy - keep reading.

But first, some recent data from Pew Research Center shows how potentially rewarding social media platforms can be for advertisers.

• 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube.
• Among teens, YouTube use rises to 85%.
• 68% of U.S. adults use Facebook.
• Facebook usage is highest among ages 18-29 (81%) and women (74%).
• 50% of U.S. adults visit Facebook at least once a day.
• Instagram’s share of the U.S. adult audience is 35% and Twitter’s is 24%.

That’s a lot of consumers who can potentially be reached by a given ad. The challenge is to turn the potential of social media advertising into a real return on investment. Measuring the effectiveness of social media advertising has been controversial, with concerns about transparency over impressions and other key metrics. But setting aside that debate, there can be no question that brands and agencies control the creative content of their social media ads, and need to know as much as possible as soon as possible about how the ads they’re creating are likely to be viewed and acted upon by their intended social audiences.

MFour offers an advertising research product called Social Ad Testing that raises the chances of success for any social ad campaign. It’s a test that doesn’t seem like a test to the recipients you’re targeting. Instead, Social Ad Testing presents the ad as natural content in target consumers’ actual social news feeds. The test ad is consistent with all the other posts and advertisements the recipients are scrolling through in their feeds. You’re testing in the wild, so to speak - in the natural environment where your ad must flourish or fail once the campaign actually begins.

Social Ad Testing is the only method that takes your ad right into the wilds of social media. All the others do the testing in a simulated social environment. First, you’ll just observe how your test audience responds to the ad. How long was it in view? Did they click on it to activate audio? Did they share it or “like” it?

Next, you’ll step out from behind the curtain and show them the ad, so you can survey them using key qualitative questions about which creative elements work, which don’t, and how favorable they are toward the product and brand. If all signals read “go,” you launch the campaign with confidence. If the ad isn’t ready for prime time, the test will tell you not only that it needs work, but point you to the creative elements you need to improve. With that guidance, you’ll revise and retest until you know the ad is ready to give you your best shot at capturing attention and motivating consumers in the social space.

You can test an ad across different social platforms to see where you should direct your budget. Or you can test different versions, compare, and decide which is the one to use. 

The social ad space is too big and untamed to venture forth unprepared. With Social Ad Testing, you give your campaigns the best chance of breaking through.

How important is it to collect fast, accurate data about customer experiences? In one history-making case, a single bad customer experience may have destroyed an industry. 

According to Netflix’s origin myth, company founder Reed Hastings first conceived the idea of a mail-order subscription video service after being slammed with a large late fee because he was tardy in returning a videocassette of the movie, “Apollo 13” to the store he’d rented it from.

You can read this Quartz.com report about how Netflix came to be. While it’s possible that the late-fee incident has been embellished somewhat in its frequent retelling, there’s no question that Hastings wasn’t satisfied with his own video rental experiences and took them as a cue for groundbreaking entrepreneurship. The result has had immense consequences for the distribution and consumption (and more recently, the creation) of video entertainment.

According to estimates from the Digital Entertainment Group, brick-and-mortar video rental stores grossed $393 million in 2017, compared to $11.5 billion for streaming services and video on demand. Meanwhile, the number of video stores fell from nearly 30,000 in 2000 to just over 2,000 in 2017, according to a USA Today feature on America’s fastest-dying industries.

While industries typically can’t trace their collapse to a single failure to provide a satisfying customer experience, poor encounters with brands and retailers inevitably erode their earnings and chase consumers to their competitors. Negative sentiment takes wing in an instant on the internet, and if those perceptions take hold they will threaten revenues and profits.

So staying continually on top of what consumers think and feel about a brand should be a day-by-day priority, verging on an obsession, for market research. Now, thanks to GPS location studies conducted through a mobile research app, it’s an obsession that’s easy to satisfy.

The best time to assess the quality of consumers’ shopping experiences is while the experiences are actually happening, or just after. In-store and after-visit mobile geolocation studies get that job done. Store atmosphere, service quality, pricing, the ease or difficulty shoppers have in navigating the aisles to find the products they want – all can be best assessed at the Point-of-Emotion^®. It’s the spot on the place/time continuum where responses from consumers are most vivid and come closest to the whole truth about what they are experiencing, how they feel about it, and how those experiences influence their buying decisions and overall satisfaction.

Of course, GPS location studies will only be as good as who you’re locating and how engaged they are with your research. Unless you want heaps of well-documented trouble associated with the quality of online consumer surveys, the crucial “who” has to be a first-party, single-source consumer panel of validated actual shoppers. MFour’s consumers are gathered around Surveys On The Go^®, the most highly-developed, highest-rated mobile research app.

The satisfaction of 2.5 million U.S. consumers who have downloaded SOTG is the big difference maker. They’re engaged, carefully profiled mobile research participants who doubly opt in to have their location journeys tracked, in exchange for increased opportunities to receive surveys they complete quickly on their smartphones. That’s how you’ll identify them in-store and survey them when it matters most.

Expect 25% response rates within an hour, and 50% within 24 hours. And if you want to follow them beyond the moments of shopping and purchasing, and understand their satisfaction at the moment they’re actually using or consuming a product, that’s also an easy “get” for in-app mobile. Expect response rates of 85% for In-Home User Tests conducted up to two weeks after a purchase.

Reed Hastings realized he could transform the movie-rental experience (and the future of rental revenues) by using technology to make it easy on the consumer. You can do the same for yourself. Market research conducted with the state-of-the-art GPS location and consumer-panel quality unique to in-app mobile research will be more satisfying to you as a consumer of market research tools. If the online consumer data you’ve been collecting isn’t giving you what you need, maybe it’s time for some innovative thinking and action of your own.  

While market research continues to pop the questions it takes to gain consumer insights, young adults in the U.S. are becoming less and less likely to pop the question that sets couples on the path to marriage.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 29% of today’s 18- to 34-year-olds are married, compared to 59% in 1978. The median age at first marriage is now 29.8 years for men and 27.8 years for women, continuing a steady climb that began in1950 and has accelerated since the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, 3.85 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2017, a drop of 2% in just one year, and a decline of nearly 7% from the number of U.S. births in 2009.

Economics is clearly a factor. Among the 71% of adults under 35 who are not married, only 20% earn at least $40,000 a year. For married young adults, the proportion earning at least $40,000 doubles to 40%.

Marriage, parenthood and the formation of households are, of course, of fundamental importance not only to people’s personal lives, but to their lives as consumers. Perhaps the most important message that market research can take from these powerful demographic developments is that big changes are afoot, even for enduring facets of life that many of us consider unshakable. In the face of great changes, it’s crucial for consumer insights professionals to be constantly alert and rapidly adaptable when it comes to the best practices for understanding how the consumer landscape is shifting.

Given these realities, does it make sense to accept longstanding common wisdom about research and its methods? For example, should long term tracking studies put such a premium on methodological consistency that they sacrifice accuracy for the sake of keeping all their data ducks in a neat row?  The acceleration of change should tell you that those ducks are probably waddling around in patterns that have changed considerably since the tracking study was launched.

If you’re committed to continuity in your online trackers, and worried that you’ll lose data continuity if you switch to mobile, it’s time for more flexible thinking. Mobile living is the way consumers live today. Their phones are always with them. The personal computers you’ve relied on for answers to online tracking surveys are now optional for many consumers, and they’ve become especially less relevant outside of white-collar workplaces and home offices.

So if you’re still holding out against mobile tracking data, maybe it’s time to reconsider whether that approach is really stalwart and steady-on. In a changing world, integrating mobile data into tracking studies isn’t the risky play. It’s the conservative move – if data accuracy and true consumer representation are the values you’re trying to conserve. In a time of flux, the riskiest behavior is to ignore fundamental changes and stand still. For better or for worse, it’s just a fact that young adults are postponing marriage. It’s also just a fact that consumers have gone mobile. To stay on track, trackers must move with them.

For more on how to integrate mobile into your tracking studies, just click here.

Empathy is indispensable to strong friendships, marriages, and any other rewarding human interaction. For brands, forging empathetic bonds is the essence of winning customer loyalty. Consumer insights pros have a pivotal role to play in empathy building, since they are the observing eyes and attentive ears who collect the data that leads to understanding, without which there can be no emotion-based connection.

A recent article posted online by the Harvard Business Review explores new ways of training employees to understand and empathize with the customers they serve. It lays out a four-step process that, significantly, begins with “Gathering insights. What is broken, frustrating, surprising or uncomfortable for your customer?”

The article, “To Get Employees To Empathize with Customers, Get them To Think Like Customers,” proposes a bit of unusual game-playing to put employees in customers’ shoes. Authors Erin Henkel and Adam Grant suggest that managers identify a business in an unrelated industry that interacts with customers in ways comparable to the one trying to up its customer-empathy game. Then it sends employees to have a customer experience with the mirror brand, and see how it feels to need service and see where it succeeds or falls short. The idea is that there will be more freedom for discussion if their own company’s policies and execution are not the direct subject of a customer-empathy discussion.

“It takes time and energy to design these experiences,” the authors write, “….but we’ve found them to be a powerful way to ensure that the people in your organization truly understand their customers.”

The challenge for any brand as it tries to understand “what is broken, frustrating, surprising or uncomfortable for your customer” is to strike while the emotions and experiences are hot.

Too often, the data harvested via consumer surveys reflects stale memories, and little, if any emotion, because emotion often flares during and directly after an experience, but quickly subsides.

In an act of empathy for marketers and market researchers, we’ll lay out the bones of our solution, which we call survey research at the Point-of-Emotion^®.

First comes the not-so-secret ingredient: a first-party consumer panel of representative U.S. consumers.

Next comes the unique, proprietary ingredient: Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG), the research industry’s most advanced and reliable mobile app for locating and surveying consumers during their buying journeys. We’ve empathized with our app-users by giving them great mobile experiences that satisfy their demand for smooth-functioning, fun experiences on their smartphones

Since its debut in 2011, SOTG has received consistent ratings of 4.5-stars out of 5 at the Apple and Google Play stores. Our users’ satisfaction gets you the engagement you need for fast, accurate data.

The right people, engaged by the right technology, gets you the right-now, right-place data you need to uncork emotions and experiences before they’ve gone flat due to the passage of time. You can field surveys while your audience is still in a store, or wait until they exit for a post-visit survey that captures their entire experience.

For an empathetic discussion of how mobile-app location studies can meet your projects’ specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here.

Accurate consumer insights on Millennials will continue to be essential for decades. MFour Client ROTH Capital Partners (ROTH) has taken the challenge seriously, undertaking an in-depth study of 2,500 Millennial men and women in partnership with MFour.

You can check out ROTH’s announcement of its 2018-2019 Millennial Study by clicking here.

The survey encompassed 181 questions and had an average Length of Interview of more than 28 minutes, confirming respondents’ willingness to engage with longer, in-depth surveys if they’re conducted in the mobile-app environment that has become the most natural habitat for today’s consumers.

Among the study’s findings:

• Two thirds of Millennials prefer to research significant purchases online, but 57% still prefer to carry out transactions in-store.

• Virtual Reality shopping has become a fact, with 15% of Millennials saying they have used VR to evaluate furniture, while 16% have used “virtual mirrors” to see how they’ll actually look in cosmetics or clothes they’re considering.

• Nike’s marketing gamble on Colin Kaepernick has paid off with Millennials – 34% said they’re more likely to purchase Nike products following the ad campaign featuring the controversial NFL quarterback, compared to 15% who said the ads made them less likely to purchase Nike goods.

Mobile studies such as the one by ROTH dispel two main myths of market research:

• That Millennials are a generation that’s especially “hard to reach." 

• And that mobile surveys are only effective for quick-hit surveys with short, simple questionnaires.

Increasingly, consumer insights professionals are realizing that Millennials are well in reach and can be understood in-depth if you reach out to them in the mobile-app space where they’re most comfortable.

Benjamin Franklin said that “games lubricate the body and the mind,” and you could probably generate a lively debate as to whether the founding father’s wisdom applies to video games.

There’s no debating the importance of video games to a huge audience of players. Which means that there’s no debating the need for market research professionals to turn their gaze and consumer insights expertise toward understanding gamers– not just as game-players, but as fully-contextualized consumers.

As we’ll point out, mobile game apps aren’t just a gateway to fun for their users and a river of potential profits for their creators, but also a pipeline for all kinds of consumer insights into how gamers fit into a larger universe of shopping and buying.

Newzoo, a marketing and analytics consultant that tracks the gaming and esports industries, estimates the North American video games market at more than $34 billion in 2018, up 14% from 2017. It recently reported that there are 2.3 billion gamers worldwide, who it estimates will spend $138 billion this year, including $70 billion spent by mobile gamers. It’s the first time mobile will have accounted for more than half of annual worldwide gaming revenues.

Market researchers who want to get to know those many mobile gamers are in luck. Thanks to mobile-app targeting, they can be reached with 100% accuracy. You can design a survey that blankets users of the top five gaming apps, or just a single app.  You can ask about their gaming preferences – or their snack and beverage preferences. Mobile app-targeting from MFour gives you a 100% Incidence Rate for connecting with consumers by the apps they use. We simply match the apps you want to target against the apps used by the validated, first-party mobile consumers who’ve downloaded our Surveys On The Go^® research app. 

For example, back when the Pokémon Go craze broke out, mobile app targeting enabled us to be the first organization to conduct a systematic survey of Pokémon Go players. Within a single day, we got 1,000 completed responses from 100% validated players. It wasn’t just proof of Pokémon Go’s popularity, but of Surveys On The Go^®'s effectiveness, thanks to its own popularity among 2.5 million U.S. consumers who have downloaded it and are beyond-willing to participate in your research.   

If you’re looking for insights into what players think of various video games, app-targeting obviously gives you a fast, direct connection. But it will be just as useful for understanding consumers ages 13 and over for whom playing video games is just part of who they are.  They’ll readily engage with you about products and services across any consumer sectors. Remember, your IR is 100% – a big first step toward getting insights on a fast-turn deadline.

Of course, the same kind of targeting can be done with consumers who use banking apps, news apps, or streaming apps for sports and entertainment. You can focus on their satisfaction with the apps themselves, or just use the connection to get feedback on the snacks these app-users buy, the other forms of entertainment they consume, which electronics stores they frequent, and any other subject that may or may not have to do with their gaming.

You can even ask them if they agree with Ben Franklin that games are good for the mind and body. 

As promised, here’s a look at our study of 1,000 Pokémon Go players, completed in a singled  day just after the game’s July, 2016 debut in the U.S. Just click here.

(Left to right) Renee Curtis, Tatiana Santos and Monica Lee

MFour announces the hiring of three team members who will play major roles in developing new mobile market research products and executing clients’ survey-based projects.

Tatiana Santos joins the staff as a Senior Project Manager who will shepherd clients’ projects from conception through data reporting. She previously was a Senior Project Manager for Ipsos. She worked in banking and investment management before branching into market research. Tatiana earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of California, Riverside, and a Master’s degree in Communication Management from the University of Southern California. Outside of work she enjoys yoga, reading, biking and listening to podcasts.

Monica Lee has been hired as Lead of the Fielding and Panel team, responsible for driving quality and consistency in core functions of the survey process. She arrives from comScore, where she was an Insights Analyst. Monica also previously has worked at Kantar Millward Brown, and she was one of the key research leads for the 2016 edition of the American Marketing Association’s annual Gold Report on the market research industry. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and a Master's in Marketing Research, both from Michigan State University.

Renee Curtis, Senior Product Manager, will help develop innovative new mobile research products and enhance existing ones. She arrives from Broadbean Technology, where she was a team leader and oversaw the launch of a successful job distribution and record keeping software product used by government contractors. She is working toward a Bachelor’s degree in Technological Entrepreneurship and Management at Orange Coast College. Outside of work, Renee likes hiking and is a fine-dining enthusiast; she’s also serious about improving her German and then visiting Berlin.

Welcome aboard, Tatiana, Monica and Renee!

Three weeks ahead of Black Friday, Starbucks Coffee found itself with its own unique doorbuster on its hands. The coffeehouse giant was offering a free, reusable cup with cheerful holiday designs featuring the Starbucks logo to any customer who came in on Friday, Nov. 2 and ordered one of Starbucks’ special seasonal coffee drinks.

The result? A whopping 41% spike in foot traffic over the average Friday. There was even an apparent echo effect: on Saturday, Nov. 3, the day after the one-day offer, foot traffic was 16% greater than the average Saturday.

Market researchers interested in gaining insights into coffeehouse chains and quick-serve restaurants can see the spike in foot traffic for themselves in chart form on MFour’s Path-2-Purchase^® Platform. Plug in “Starbucks” on the free Path-2-Purchase tracking tool, and you’ll see the big surge that occurred on Nov. 2-3, and how visits on the day of the cup giveaway compared to every other day in the preceding three months.

Path-2-Purchase is unique in its ability to track validated, representative U.S. consumers’ visits to 12.5 million locations, including all of the top 1,000 retail and restaurant chains. On the technology side it’s powered by advanced GPS location technology and MFour’s unrivaled Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG) mobile research app. On the people side, SOTG gives researchers the ability to connect with the 2.5 million first-party consumers who have downloaded the app.

SOTG users give double opt-in consent to have their movements tracked using their smartphones’ GPS features, in exchange for opportunities to receive location-specific surveys that earn them cash rewards. It’s these demographically profiled consumers’ engagement with SOTG that makes it possible for marketers and market researchers to see where they go, when and how often – and to gain otherwise unobtainable insights into events such as the Starbucks cup giveaway.

Tracking is only a means to the most productive research end: connecting with the consumers you’ve tracked to survey them about the experiences they’ve had at any stop along their paths to purchase. For example, a researcher interested in the competition in coffee could use Path-2-Purchase data to identify validated Starbucks customers and send them surveys. You also could overlay Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts locations to compare visitation and identify important consumer segments. Segments might include coffee-agnostics who go to both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, or loyalists who are customers of one but never the other.

Once you've identified your segments, you can survey those consumers to understand the all-import “why” behind their coffee buy.

We know there's no shortage of GPS visitation tracking providers, but all the rest are only capable of counting footprints and spitting out numbers. The location data they give you ends there, leaving the actual consumers who've left those footprints all but invisible.

But when you conduct location-based mobile research using Surveys On The Go, the validated, first-party consumers you track are profiled, real and reachable, so you can connect with them for the "why" behind the buy.

As it turned out, Dunkin’ Donuts managed to hold its own during Starbucks’ big Friday cup giveaway: nationwide, its traffic fell just 1% below the Friday average.  

In fact, Starbucks’ cup giveaway actually turned out to be a little too successful. The Today Show reported on its website that supplies quickly ran out at some locations, leaving customers disappointed. 

If you’re so inclined, we can identify and put you in touch with members of the SOTG consumer panel who went to a Starbucks on Nov. 2 (or on any other day). Ask them about their experiences with the special giveaway. Are they in love with their free cups? Are they miffed because the Starbucks they went to had run out? Did they try one of the special holiday brews? Was it delish or just so-so? And how did the cup giveaway impact their overall satisfaction with the Starbucks brand?

When it comes to coffee, or anything else in the consumer realm, Path-2-Purchase^® Platform gives you a heaping, caffeinated cup of quick-turnaround research you can’t accomplish anywhere else.