Consumer insights professionals are always trying to help businesses stay on top of changes in the marketplace. What determines how we live as consumers? What drives changes in what we want, how we shop, and what we buy?

There were a number of hugely significant change agents in the 20^th century, not least the automobile. Even now, after nearly 100 years of dominating personal transportation, autos continue to change in fundamental ways as manufacturers address problems such as emissions, mileage and even the need for a human behind the wheel. Consumers continue to respond to each new advance.

Now, in the 21^st Century, the key transformation has been the ability of all to journey online to connect with others and exchange information. Its changes, including smartphones for access and social media for posting and sharing, have been faster and more protean than the automobile’s. Like the automobile, the internet needs to address a serious pollution problem –the persistence of fraud.

Keith Weed, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer, summed up the challenges of fraud in social media marketing in a recent interview with the New York Times about Twitter’s decision to remove tens of millions of fraudulent accounts. The fake accounts are believed to have been created by online “influencers” to falsely fatten up the reach of their influence. The victims are brands that pay influencers to promote products to their audiences. If these intermediaries are influencing real consumers, then they’re earning their money. If their audience is manufactured, that’s fraud.

Cleaning up the pollution of fraud and falsity can only benefit social platforms, Weed told the Times.  “People will believe more and read more on Twitter if they know there is less bot activity and more human activity. I would encourage and ask others to follow.” For its own part, Unilever has announced it would no longer pay influencers who have bolstered their followings by creating fake accounts or purchasing followers from brokers.

The consumer insights industry is by now well aware of the predations of fraudsters who impersonate real consumers by launching survey bots or by taking the same survey multiple times. Data collection that fails to safeguard against fraud threatens consumer insights’ ability to be taken seriously by business decision makers. Consequently, data pollution isn’t a tolerable irritant for market research, akin to catching a cold, but an existential threat comparable to catching Zika.

To avoid being stung, researchers should consider the following:

• Insist that providers be transparent about how they source consumer panels to take your surveys.
  
  
• Realize that first-party consumer panels are vetted and validated with multiple opt-ins to separate real people from bots.
  
  
• Understand that smartphones now reign over laptops and desktops as survey-taking tools.
  
  
• Bone up on how smartphone-specific capabilities such as including requests for “video selfies” in surveys not only elicit especially rich, in-the-moment responses, but certify the respondents as actual human beings.
  
  
• Stay away from online surveys, which take place in an unhealthy, fraud-infested environment.
  
  
• Learn the difference between in-app mobile surveys, which are instantly embedded in respondents phones and are taken in the safe offline space, and “mobile optimized” or “mobile web” surveys, which misuse smartphones by turning them into mere conduits to the hazardous online space.

If this makes sense, take 20 or 30 minutes to learn how in-app mobile solutions will meet your specific research needs with data you can trust. To set up a call, just click here.

Serve free Slurpees, get 53% more customers.

That was the sweet deal for 7-Eleven in its annual July 11 Slurpee giveaway, in honor of July 11 being 7-11. We were able to quickly quantify this huge spike in nationwide store traffic because we track U.S. consumers’ shopping journeys 24-7 on our Path-2-Purchase™ Platform.

Platform users get location-visit data that’s updated daily, encompassing visits to 12.5 million commercially relevant locations nationwide, including all outlets of the top 1,000 U.S. retailers.

And here’s why it matters, using the 7-Eleven Day giveaway as an example.

• What will happen in the days and weeks following 7-Eleven customers’ big Slurpee binge? Will the surge in traffic be nice and sticky, or will it melt away like a cup of ice in the summer heat? Answers are at your fingertips, because Path-2-Purchase™ is always on, providing an inexhaustible fountain of validated consumer-journey intelligence for everyone.

• Did 7-Eleven’s free Slurpees peel away customers who typically go to a different store for cold drinks, gasoline, and other C-store sundries? You can identify other brands’ frequent visitors and see whether they defected to 7-Eleven on 7-11 to get that free refreshment. And you can keep tracking them as time goes on, to see whether it was a one-day stand, or whether they are now going steady with 7-Eleven.

• What kinds of product giveaways would work for a different C-Store or for a Quick-Serve Restaurant? With Path-2-Purchase™ you can identify and target consumers who visited 7-Eleven on free Slurpee day, and send them a survey. Ask what they thought of 7-Eleven’s giveaway, and what kinds of items they’d go out of their way to get for free at another chain’s stores. 

• Do the same kind of research around any retailer or brand’s major promotion, whether it’s daylong, weeklong, or monthlong.

Like everybody else, consumer insights professionals are waiting to see what’s in store for the U.S. retail market as new tariffs on imported goods kick in. But no matter what’s happening in global, national or regional economies, whether positive or negative, brands and researchers need to be plugged in to the best data streams they can access. In tense times for the economy, good, data-driven decision-making becomes all the more important.

In the case of the current tension over tariffs, the conditions businesses must respond to are changing literally by the day. Earlier this week, the National Retail Federation (NRF) had provided some baseline statistics reflecting conditions and key indicators as they had stood before the first round of tariff increases. Based on those, the NRF had predicted that we wouldn’t see significant declines in imports or retail revenues despite the tariffs, because of inelasticity in supply chains and consumer demand. 

“Retailers cannot easily or quickly change their global supply chains, so imports from China and elsewhere are expected to continue to grow for the foreseeable future,” Jonathan Gold, NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy, said in the release dated July 9. At retail checkouts and store aisles, he added, the tariffs “will mean higher prices for Americans rather than significant changes to international trade.”

But the NRF adopted a far more alarmed tone just a day later, when President Trump announced a much greater escalation in tariffs on products from China. 

"The threat to the U.S. economy is not a question of ‘if’ and more about ‘when’ and ‘how bad,’' the NRF said in response, in a press release headlined "Retailers Say New Tariffs Against China Will Boomerang Back to Harm U.S. Families and Workers."

The bottom line, the NRF now predicts, is that "tariffs on such a broad scope of products make it inconceivable that American consumers will dodge this tax increase as prices of everyday products will be forced to rise. And the retaliation that will follow will destroy thousands of U.S. jobs and hurt farmers, local businesses and entire communities."

Before the latest announcement of the administration's intent to ratchet up tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, the NRF had forecast an increase of about 4% in retail revenues this year (excluding automobiles, gas stations and restaurants) -- down from the 7.8% increase recorded in 2017, but still a year of growth. Now it's hard to predict what might ensue over the coming six months.

In times both calm and nervous -- perhaps especially when times are nervous -- brands need to stay closely in touch with consumers to keep making the best decisions under whatever circumstances prevail. Whether they are exploiting opportunities when conditions favor growth, or defending market share when the going gets difficult, retailers and product marketers need data they can rely on to help drive the right decisions.

One thing that won't be changing is the the accuracy and validation marketers and consumer insights professionals will access from a state-of-the-art mobile app research app that's used by a representative, first-party  panel of mobile consumers. Connecting with respondents with a mobile app opens doors to unique, location-based research possibilities, including collecting passive data showing consumers' journeys along the entire path to purchase. Smartphones' multimedia functions power further capabilities, such as asking for "video selfie" responses in which interviewees provide vivid, in-their-own-words feedback.

Bad data can itself be viewed as a kind of tariff on business success, but it's a tax that no business needs to pay. To learn how app-powered surveys, observational location tracking and other advanced mobile capabilities can meet your specific projects’ needs, you're invited to set up a demo session with a mobile-app research expert from MFour. Just click here.

There’s an intriguing suggestion for consumer insights professionals in the July issue of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review: “Consider measuring the future to inform the present."

Research data that can accomplish this feat, we're told, can help brands “proactively change [consumers'] present behavior” in ways beneficial to future bottom lines.

Is this a suggestion that market research take cues from time-travel film scripts such as “Twelve Monkeys” and “The Time Machine?” Nope. It’s a piece of intriguing, out-of-the-box thinking from the Quirk’s article,“Going Beyond Self-Report,” by Jason Martuscello of BEESY, a marketing intelligence company grounded in behavioral science.

After getting our attention with his future-leaning vision of market research, the author makes it clear he’s talking about brands finding a way to influence today's consumers by asking about their expectations for tomorrow and beyond: “how they expect to feel” and where they “want to go.” Martuscello contrasts this eyes-forward approach with how “most research uses the past and present to passively predict future behavior.”

The article evenhandedly summarizes biases and limitations of self-report survey research, as well as biases and limitations of biometrics and other “new implicit [data] methodologies” that aim to supersede traditional surveys by probing for presumably more reliable non-conscious indicators of consumer sentiment.

But Martuscello also defends the value of self-reported consumer feedback – with the caveat that the surveys eliciting those responses must be well-designed.

“With concepts like cognitive biases and human irrationality taking center stage recently, it’s worth noting that people are real and can provide accurate answers to well-designed and structured surveys," he writes. "Tremendous business value can be exacted….People who claim self-reports are unreliable sources of information typically are misusing them,” or have partisan reasons for dismissing surveys as simply passé. 

The most trustworthy self-reported data about consumer sentiment and intentions, Martuscello adds, is that which demonstrates what he calls “stability,” “persistence” and “durability.”

“When intentions are stable (e.g., same over time) they are resistant to change and are better predictors of behavior.”

MFour's own method for overcoming recall bias and predicting consumer behavior emphasizes observing the actual buying journeys of real respondents from a first-party consumer panel, and using those observed journeys as a springboard to better-targeted and better-designed surveys that allow consumer insights professionals to  understand the “why” behind the "who, what and where." 

These consumer journeys, as visualized on the new Path 2 Purchase™ Platform, can be thought of as bringing together the past, present and future of real, validated consumers. Researchers get to follow  doubly opted-in members of the largest first-party, all-mobile panel of U.S. consumers as they move through time and space. The result is a way to influence future behaviors with data that helps decision-makers draw reliable conclusions about how and why current actions and attitudes came to be. 

The Path 2 Purchase™ process begins with targeting carefully profiled consumers who have been tracked and geolocated at a relevant retail location in real time. They then can be surveyed in-store or shortly after their visit. But instead of capturing an isolated event that is already receding into the past, Path 2 Purchase™ makes it possible to turn the survey encounter into a point on a continuum.

• Researchers can look backward at the journeys that preceded the survey, illuminating the answers given at that specific moment.

• Then they can carry on their studies into the future by watching the same consumers' ongoing journeys. If they stated an intention or a preference in the survey, did they follow through on it?

• For example, you can interview a consumer at an auto dealership at an early stage in his or her car-shopping journey, and then see how many other dealerships, and of what makes, the same shopper subsequently visited.

This is why we say that Path 2 Purchase™ encompasses the future, as well as the present and the past. The result is a holistic view of validated consumer behavior along an ongoing continuum, rather than just a glimpse of a snapshot from a single point in time. 

And, thanks to the unique multimedia capabilities of smartphones and the advanced mobile-app surveys that take full advantage of their data-producing potential, you can literally see consumers as they are making their journeys. For example, by asking them to submit open-ended  “video selfie” responses that bring emotions and motivations fully to life. A further advantage of video responses: ironclad protection against data fraud, as you watch and listen as real people who are truly engaged with your questions give you their honest feedback.

To repeat a key passage from Jason Martuscello in his Quirk’s essay:

"It’s worth noting that people are real and can provide accurate answers to well-designed and structured surveys. Tremendous business value can be exacted….People who claim self-reports are unreliable sources of information typically are misusing them….”

For a productive demo and discussion of how you can get reliable location and survey data that helps you rise to the challenge of looking ahead and not just behind, just click here.

Advanced market research technology and the consumer insights it generates are keys to launching successful advertising campaigns, and Chief Marketing Officers who understand how data can inform creativity are driving disproportionately strong results for their companies.

A new report, “The Perfect Union: Unlocking the Next Wave of Growth by Unifying Creativity and Analytics,” bluntly separates marketers into those who eagerly embrace using data analytics to bolster ads’ creative content, and those who are staying on the sidelines. The full story is reported in Campaign, a global marketing and advertising publication.

Conducted by McKinsey and the Association of National Advertisers, the study divides marketers into three groups: “integrators" have learned how to incorporate data in their creative work; "isolators" think data is useful but tend not to weave it into the creative process; and "idlers" are not even exploring the possible interface between data and advertising creative.

"You don’t create exciting things for people by figuring out things from data," commented one of the 200 CMOs who participated in the study.

The report’s authors disagree. "Actually, we believe that’s exactly what data can do. Analytics are what companies have learned about people’s behavior. Such insights can guide and inform where imagination needs to go. In the best cases, they can even inspire."

It's with that cooperative dynamic in mind that MFour has created an easy way to bridge this perceived conflict between data and creative intuition. Social Ad Testing, as it's called, gives CMOs at any stage in their journeys with data analytics a way to present illuminating data to creative teams in a non-threatening way that will validate their best intuitions and guide them when data suggests there's a need to revise a soda media to maximize its impact. Here’s how it works:

• After the creative team develops a digital ad campaign, marketers can inject each ad into the actual social media news feeds of the target groups their brand needs to reach.

• Instead of a simulation, validated, first-party consumers perceive the test ads as regular content amid the usual stream of news and posts they receive from friends, family, and all other sources.

• What do they do? Obtain observed, quantitative data that shows how recipients interact with test ads: opens, shares, likes, and clicks to enable audio.

• What do they think and perceive? Survey test-ad recipients for brand and product recall. Then re-send the ad for their comments, as if they were a mobile focus group.

• Where does the ad belong? Compare results on different social platforms and budget accordingly.

• High marks from consumers will validate the creative team’s concepts and execution, and the campaign can launch with confidence.

• If the test uncovers problems, the marketing and creative departments will see specific areas that need fixes. The data analytics provide a frame for creative efforts to perfect the ad, but the canvas still belongs to the creators.

If you’re a consumer insights professional for a brand or retailer, you’re probably getting ready to celebrate Christmas in July, although “celebrating” might not be quite the right word for it.

With so much revenue at stake during the holiday season, it’s smart to get an early jump on obtaining data that can give you an early read on consumers’ holiday spending inclinations and expectations. A baseline sense of their attitudes toward gift-shopping, travel and holiday parties could be the foundation for smart, data-informed thinking that will pay off during the year-end shopping crunch.

Those payoffs are potentially gigantic, so a few ounces of data-driven early preparation could reap a ton of success come the holidays. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reported that U.S. consumers spent $692 billion last November-December, not counting restaurants, gas stations and auto dealers. With that much money on the table, it’s worth your while to take a systematic, data-informed look ahead.

A wide range of retail categories historically have earned 20% or more of their annual revenues during November and December, according to the NRF. They includes jewelry stores, department stores, discount department stores, electronics and appliance retailers, clothing and shoe stores, sporting goods stores, hobby shops, book stores and music stores.

Here are examples of early-insights holiday research projects that might be worth exploring:

• What are your loyal customers’ deep-down feelings about what makes for a great Christmas- shopping experience?
  
  
• Start by gathering observational location-tracking data to identify your year-round loyalists (or your competitors’ loyalists).

• Survey them now about what has made past Christmas shopping experiences special, or disappointing? What they say in July could be at least as revealing as what they say during the post-Thanksgiving heat of the hunt.

• What makes special holiday features such as decorations and live Christmas music memorable and appealing rather than merely cliched? What turnoffs get in the way of a satisfying holiday shopping experience?

• Art supply stores and hobby stores can track, identify and survey their loyalists and non-buyers who shop nearby. Get a preliminary sense of the market for DIYcreativity in gift-giving and greeting cards. 

• When should casual dining restaurants launch special holiday menus? What offers would induce their regular customers to ramp up their patronage by organizing larger dine-out dinner parties with friends and coworkers? When do consumers most want to socialize outside their immediate families?

If you think it’s worth breaking a sweat in July to land data and insights that will pay off when "Jingle Bells" is in the air, we should talk soon. Set up a productive and informative demo by clicking here.

Meanwhile, here’s wishing a happy and safe Fourth of July to all.

MFour is delighted to be the newest member of DPAA (Digital Place Based Advertising Association), a global organization that provides leadership for the Digital Out of Home industry, serving as a nexus for information, marketing, and connections and collaborations. 

"MFour…is at the heart of why advertising on digital out-of-home media is growing so rapidly,” said Barry Frey, DPAA President and CEO.

“What we can do is extremely helpful to digital out-of-home advertisers and others in the OOH space,” added Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s CEO and co-founder. “We are honored to be joining DPAA, and look forward to sharing what we’ve learned with our fellow members.”

To read the DPAA’s full announcement, click here.MFour enables OOH advertisers to observe opted-in consumers’ location journeys in real time, then survey them soon after an ad exposure or after any other relevant experience. To set up a live demo, just get in touch by clicking here.

Are you one of the many marketing and consumer insights professionals who have doubts whether they're getting good, representative data needed to understand Hispanics, African Americans, Millennials and Gen Z? Here's something new from the U.S. Census Bureau that shows how urgent it is that you stop subscribing to the common belief that certain groups are just "hard to reach."

“Population Continues To Become More Diverse,” is one of the section headlines in a new Census Bureau report that updates the U.S. population count and its demographic makeup.

The report spells more trouble for brands that can't get on top of understanding Hispanics, African Americans, and the Millennial and Gen Z generations that are the most diverse in U.S. history.

The reason they seem "hard to reach" is straightforward: Hispanics, African Americans, Millennials and Gen Z all have a strong preference for their smartphones over desktops and laptops when it comes to accessing, creating and sharing information. Research that doesn't get the mobile dimension right will inevitably suffer a data disconnect that you simply can no longer afford.  

These key figures from the new Census Bureau estimates tell the story:

• The  U.S. Hispanic population grew 2.1% between 2016 and 2017, to 58.9 million. Hispanics now make up 18% of America’s nearly 326 million inhabitants.

• African Americans’ numbers, grew 1.2%, to 47.4 million. They now account for 14.6% of the U.S. population.

• People of Asian descent now make up nearly 7% of the population, after a 3.1% increase. 

• While whites remain the biggest population group,  at 197.8 million, their numbers actually declined .02% from the previous year.

• Millennials (now ages 22 to 37) make up 22% of the population and are coming into their own as the key drivers of U.S. consumption. If market researchers can’t find a way to reach them, there will be gaping holes in their ability to  understand the consumer cohort that carries the most weight.

• Gen Z – newborns to age 21 – make up nearly 28% of the population, and they’re even more smartphone-focused than Millennials.

You’re always on a quest for the best consumer insights, so doesn't it make sense to engage consumers in the way they’d most like to be engaged?

A new report from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), tells you exactly where to look. Here’s the key takeaway from the CTA’s announcement of findings from a survey of 2,016 U.S. adults:

“Smartphones continue their meteoric popularity and are now owned in 87% of U.S. homes, second only to televisions at 96 percent ownership.” Laptop computers are in 72% of households.

Adds Steve Koenig, the organizations’s vice president of market research, “The rapid ascent of smartphone ownership in U.S. households exemplifies the versatility of these devices – for communication, for entertainment, for productivity and more. And because of that, it’s possible we’ll see smartphone ownership in the U.S. match that of TVs within the next five years.”Separate studies by Pew Research Center have found that 77% of individual U.S. adults use smartphones, with the numbers soaring past 90% for Millennials and Gen Z. Meanwhile, says Pew, 20% of U.S. adults are strictly smartphone-reliant for online access, choosing to dispense with broadband subscriptions.

If you’re seeking insights from mobile consumers (who are now synonymous with consumers, period), you’ll profit from learning about mobile research best-practices. The crucial distinction to remember as  you explore how best to reach mobile consumers is between mobile research conducted with a proprietary app that’s been downloaded by a large and representative panel of validated, first-party consumers, and the mobile web approach (aka “mobile optimized” or “mobile first”). Mobile-app fully embraces the Smartphone Era and its vast possibilities for consumer insights. Mobile web, as its name implies, takes half-measures by attempting to adapt traditional online surveys to small screens; there's no attempt to master the special app technology required for seamless, sophisticated experiences for the researcher and mobile consumer alike.

If you’d like to learn more about in-app mobile and special capabilities such as location studies and harnessing phones’ multimedia capabilities for qualitative, in-their-own-words “video selfie” feedback, let’s set up a live demo. Just click here.

 Concerns about consumers’ privacy and informed consent continue to upset the market for third-party consumer data, with clear implications for marketing and consumer insights professionals who now need to find fully transparent data sources for their research.

In the latest development that impacts data sourcing, the Associated Press reports that  “Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have pledged to stop providing information on U.S. phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy.”

Instead of a putting a squeeze on researchers’ ability to track consumers’ movements with passive location data, the stepped-up privacy and consent requirements present an opportunity to improve the quality of that data, and the usefulness of the analysis and  recommendations they produce. Vardan Kikrakosyan, MFour’s Vice President of Research Solutions, explained why in a recent commentary on the impact of the General Data Privacy Regulation and its ripple effects. Here’s a key excerpt:

“MFour welcomes the new privacy and consent laws because they’re the same rules under which we’ve always operated. We’ve recognized from the start that in research, as in retail, the consumer must come first.

Data transparency and consumer consent are hardwired into our agreements  with the more than 2 million U.S. consumers who have downloaded Surveys On The Go^®, the pioneering mobile app MFour launched in 2011 to bring consumer research into the Smartphone Era.

For example, rather than track consumers' movements surreptitiously, or obtain merely technical, legalistic consent via fine print in the app’s terms of use, our policy is to give our app-users regular reminders that we would like them to turn on their devices’ location features.

We make sure they understand that, in return for letting us keep track of their whereabouts, they are more likely to qualify for location-based surveys whose cash rewards are especially attractive.

The proposition is clearly stated, and the decision is theirs to make. It's what fair-dealing with consumers in the research realm demands: always making it clear that they have agency over their data and participation.

If a consumer who uses Surveys On The Go^® would rather not be tracked by location, that’s fine; that person remains an app-user in good standing, and is still eligible for studies that are not location-sensitive. Personally identifiable information is always kept confidential and not shared with clients or anybody else….

Now the Digital Era is edging closer to maturity, and the Wild West mentality that has allowed some data collectors to play fast and loose with transparency and consent has nearly run its course….The realization will spread industry-wide that data quality comes first, that it doesn’t come dirt cheap, and that it doesn’t come from just anywhere, but from reliable, validated, first-party consumers who are being treated fairly and transparently, and having quality research experiences.”

As you take steps to assure that the data you’re sourcing complies with privacy and consent requirements, don’t forget to explore how you can turn what may seem like a limitation into an opportunity. To have a conversation about how a validated, doubly opted-in, first-party panel can help you meet your projects’ specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here.