Do consumers  trust your brand? If the answer is yes, give yourself a big pat on the back, because Americans aren’t a very trusting bunch.

According to Pew Research Center, which recently published results from a study it conducted in Spring, 2016, of how Americans perceive several leading institutions, only 4% of respondents said they had “a great deal” of trust in business leaders. Of course, “business leaders” doesn’t equate with business as a whole, or with trust in the products and services businesses create and market. But it is an indicator that commerce doesn’t automatically generate votes of confidence, and that trust in the commercial sphere has to be won and perpetually fortified.

If it’s any comfort, business leaders eked out a trust advantage over elected officials, in whom only 3% of Pew’s respondents placed “a great deal” of trust. Just 5% of respondents placed high trust in the news media, while religious leaders and K-12 school principals and superintendents were tied at 13%. The military commanded “a great deal” of trust from 33% of those surveyed, and scientists scored highest marks on the trust-meter from 21% of panelists who responded to the survey. For a chart showing Pew’s key finding about trust in institutions, click here. 

One thing that business leaders, elected officials and members of the news media have in common is that virtually nobody has direct, unmediated, human-to-human experiences with them -- unless people think of their own bosses instead of Fortune 500 CEOs when asked about “business leaders.”

But people experience brands and products intimately, so it’s much more feasible for marketers to forge bonds of trust with them. Even consumers who haven’t tried a product themselves may well have heard opinions from friends and acquaintances they consider trustworthy. In any case, staying on top of how consumers perceive brands is a perpetual necessity and a perpetual challenge.

To that end, using the right mobile methodology is crucial. There’s no question people trust their smartphones – 77% of Americans owned one when Pew last checked about a year ago, and as far back as 2014, 46% of Pew’s respondents reported that they couldn’t live without their phones.

The most important takeaway is no longer that consumer studies, including ones on brand health and product satisfaction, should be mobile because the public is virtually all-in on mobile, virtually all of the time. By now, that’s simply a given. The more nuanced and important conversation for brand researchers is which mobile methodology to choose – mobile web or mobile app. Respondents to mobile web surveys access them online, the same as traditional online surveys designed to be taken on PCs. Surveys fielded to a mobile app are taken offline, by a proprietary panel of users who show higher levels of engagement, having already taken the trouble to download and use the app.

One thing to remember about trust is that when it’s betrayed, it’s extremely hard to win back. In mobile research the trust stakes are high, because the public that loves its phones also has high expectations of them. Failure to meet those expectations can feel more like a betrayal than a mere disappointment. And then you’ve got one more potential research participant who’s tuned out in disgust and joined the multitudes who won’t participate in market research. To learn more about what distinguishes trustworthiness from shoddiness in mobile methodology, check out this recent blog post by clicking here. And for a productive conversation about how mobile-app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.

Thwack! Someone, somewhere, has just crushed a bed bug, a much-loathed critter that hides in bedclothes and the crevices of worn mattresses, and is responsible for a spate of economic growth that most Americans probably would rather do without.

Citing figures from Pest Control Magazine, Bloomberg reports that America’s pest control industry is raking in increasing revenues from bed bug calls from residences and businesses – with $611.2 million grossed in 2016, up 6.6% from the previous year, and rising. Specialty Consultants, which tracks the pest control industry, estimates that there were 908,000 calls for professional bed bug eradication or prevention in 2016, up more than 11%, and that it won’t be long before Americans are spending $1 billion yearly on bed bug control.

The only thing in dispute is where bed bug infestations are worst: Bloomberg noted that two leading pest control companies give conflicting accounts. Orkin ranks Baltimore as the bed bug capital, based on the number of commercial and residential jobs it handles there, followed by Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio. A competitor, Terminix, put out its own list of the cities where it’s busiest with bed bugs, and came up with a completely different worst-five of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas and Denver.

If this adds up to a growing, nationwide opportunity for pest control experts, it’s clearly also a big worry for the hospitality industry. Google the terms “bed bugs hotels” and you’ll find websites that ask travelers to report their own experiences with the bitty biters. Since bed bugs can be brought in by guests themselves, infestations are a tenacious problem that often is not the hotelier’s fault, but requires perpetual vigilance nonetheless.  Bloomberg cites a survey of 100 hotels by Orkin, in which respondents overwhelmingly said they are investing in preventive measures rather than waiting for complaints.

When bad luck does bite a brand, it’s important to have a game plan in place that includes getting an extremely fast but thorough read on how a publicized mishap is impacting brand health. That includes probing consumers’ emotional responses to understand both the good and the bad: fears generated by the bad news, but also underlying goodwill the brand can rely on to maintain consumers’ confidence. And that requires consumer research that’s fast and capable of homing in on consumers’ emotions in real time.

Tylenol, one of the nation’s signature brands, might have become a footnote in the history of pain relief if Johnson & Johnson hadn’t deployed smart, fast consumer research when news broke in 1982 that several Chicago-era residents had been murdered by a sociopath who’d injected poison into Tylenol capsules and put them back on store shelves, where unsuspecting shoppers then bought them. It’s a classic case of crisis management guided by fast consumer insights, and you can read about it here.

The takeaway is that when businesses are bitten by little bugs, or by major malefactors, they need to find and survey their customers and other consumers without delay, and without sacrificing data reliability for speed. Advanced mobile-app research solutions include a DIY survey platform that lets you design and field a project in a matter of minutes. You’ll reach the right consumers at the right moment on the right devices – the same smartphones on which consumers get their news about brands and investigate products. You can count on response rates of 25% in an hour and 50% in a day from research fielded to an engaged, demographically representative U.S. panel. Mobile-app research that combines the most advanced smartphone technology and the most carefully cultivated and validated, proprietary panel is at your disposal – both in the good times when you’re pushing to maximize your most lucrative opportunities, and for the bumpy patches when reality bites. For a productive conversation on how mobile-app solutions can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.

Is the market research industry finally coming around to a more meaningful conversation about best-practices for mobile research?

GreenBook’s recent “sneak preview” of the next edition of its biannual GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report bodes well for a more useful discussion in the new year. It’s not yet the fully illuminating discussion the industry should be having, but it’s definitely a step forward toward a better-informed community of insights professionals.

The key improvement is GreenBook’s decision to ditch the blanket term, “mobile surveys,” in favor of the somewhat more specific “mobile first surveys.” While not defined in the GRIT preview, “mobile-first” would seem to indicate surveys conceived and designed from the get-go to be taken on smartphones, with the specific needs and experiences of smartphone users foremost in mind. As the article notes, 50% of the insights professionals surveyed for the coming GRIT report said they employ “mobile first surveys.” Previously, when the answer choice was labeled “mobile surveys,” 75% affirmed having used them. The large difference suggests we’re already having a more nuanced conversation that’s beginning to take into account the varying levels of capability and sophistication involved in different approaches to mobile research.

But what’s still largely missing from the industry-wide lexicon is the crucial distinction between “mobile first” and “mobile app” research. They are two fundamentally different approaches, both in technology and research methodology, for understanding consumers via their smartphones. Here’s a brief comparison of how the two processes work:

Mobile First

• Panel Recruitment: Solicitations via emails and natural or invited visits to websites.

• Survey Invitations: Panelists receive emailed links.

• Accepting Invitations: Panelists click on links and are taken to surveys housed online.

• Survey Experience: Inconsistent, because it’s subject to common mobile-web glitches such as slow downloads and uploads of survey questions, weak signals, and slow or dropped connections that lead to dropped surveys, frustrated panelists, and lost completes.

Mobile App

Panel Recruitment: Panelists discover and download a publicly rated and reviewed survey app, establishing engagement and high performance expectations from the start.

• Survey Invitations: Push notifications via the app.

• Accepting Invitations: Tapping the app instantly embeds the survey in the phone itself.

• Survey Experience: Reliable, because it takes place offline, avoiding hazards of weak signals and slow or dropped web connections.

According to eMarketer, mobile consumers in the U.S. use apps 85% of the time for their digital access, compared to 15% of digital-access time devoted to the alternative, connecting to the internet via a phone’s browser. It’s a key indicator of the quality of mobile-app activities, and how much consumers prefer them.

One further thought: the conversation about mobile surveys would be better grounded in the realities of the research process if “mobile web surveys” and “mobile app surveys” were adopted as the discussion’s keywords, rather than “mobile first.” This would align with terminology routinely used by eMarketer and others who track digital access and usage.

So to walk the best walk in our mobile research, let’s talk the most precise talk, and make “mobile app” and “mobile web” the key terms and key distinctions as we pursue our conversations about the opportunities and best practices of smartphone-based consumer research. And, as always, for a productive conversation about how advanced mobile app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, just click here.

With the first weekend of NFL playoff games behind us, the Super Bowl picture is beginning to crystallize. And we can say with confidence that, whether the Feb. 4 game features a rematch of last year’s classic between the Patriots and Falcons, an all-Pennsylvania showdown between the Eagles and the Steelers, an appearance by the Minnesota Vikings as the first team to play a Super Bowl in its home stadium, or any of the other possible combinations, the day will bring a big win for pizza and chicken wings restaurants.

– Domino's reported that it sold more than 11 million slices on Super Sunday, 2017 – 4.5 times more than on a typical Sunday. That came to about one Domino’s slice for every ten viewers, based on Nielsen’s estimate of 111.3 million average viewers during the game.

– Year-round, Domino’s and Papa John’s both generate more than 60% of their sales via digital orders, including their own apps, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

– Before last year’s Super Bowl, Buffalo Wild Wings told Forbes that it expected per-store sales to more than double on game day, from an average of 6,000 wings to 13,500. Another chain, Buffalo Wings & Rings, went into the 2017 game projecting a near-doubling, from the typical 8,900 orders per day to 17,000 on Super Sunday.

– Average TV viewership for the Super Bowl telecast has ranged from 106.5 million to 114.4 million since 2010, when viewership first topped the 100 million mark.

– In a 2012 study that apparently hasn’t been updated, the National Restaurant Assn. estimated that 12 million people would watch the Super Bowl in restaurants and bars.

– An additional 1.7 million watched last year’s game on streaming devices.

It all adds up to a chance for brands and retailers catering to Super Bowl viewers to score big – not just in sales, but in consumer insights. But speed is of the essence, just as it is on the football field, if you’re going to defeat recall bias and get insights at a moment when consumers’ experiences and the emotions connected with them are fresh in mind. And on Super Bowl Sunday, just like every other day, the fastest way to get in touch with consumers is on the mobile devices they’ll have in hand or within arm’s reach while they’re watching the game.

Big television events – awards shows are another example – are big opportunities to reach a large, demographically representative group of the most relevant respondents naturally. In the Quick Serve Restaurant realm, game days and awards nights open doors to real-time responses illuminating consumer behaviors and opinions. For example:

 – You can identify panelists who have your app, or a competitor’s, on an Android device, and shoot them a survey during or just after an event telecast to find out whether and how they used it – and with what degree of satisfaction and ease -- while that experience is fresh in mind.

– Advertisers can get early viewer opinions about how their high-dollar Super Bowl commercials were received.

– Among respondents who state an intent to buy, you can trace them further along the path to purchase by sending a follow-up mobile survey a week or two after the game, to see if they have in fact bought the product they said they would. Expect an 85% follow-up response rate.

The main point about Big Event research opportunities is that surveys fielded through an advanced mobile app give you access to a large audience whose members already have a significant watching behavior in common. It’s a rare moment when so many consumers are doing the same thing. To have a productive conversation about how to leverage it for super brand insights via mobile, just get in touch by clicking here.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

Artificial Intelligence Is Great, but Won't Tell You How Consumers Feel

CMOs' Changing Role Toward Consumers: Less Talk, More Listening

Invitation To Hack: How Bad Passwords Resemble Bad Data

And here's a Friday music video to get you feeling funky for your weekend.

Here’s a thought: consumer-facing businesses are like families, with the company as parent and consumers as children who need to be listened to, understood, and influenced.

This analogy is inspired by a column in MediaPost’s MarketingDaily newsletter that argues the traditional role of Chief Marketing Officer has evolved, or should evolve, so that CMOs listen to consumers and then represent them at corporate tables where decisions are made. Instead of fashioning “one way communications from company to customer, marketers now often represent the voice of the customer,” writes Brooke Niemiec, Chief Marketing Officer for the Elicit marketing agency. Here's how she defines the evolved marketing role: “By deeply understanding all available customer insight, [CMOs] can evangelize everything they know about their customers to influence decision-making in any capacity.”

It sounds like what deeply-involved parents typically do: listen and observe to gain a full understanding of the child, then make decisions on how to influence the child to make desirable decisions. Of course, the analogy can’t be carried too far: good businesses value their customers enough to give them good consumer experiences, while good parents value their children enough to put their hearts and souls into preparing them for a good life. But in both cases, good listening, good understanding, and good thinking are crucial to getting good results.  

You can read the MediaPost column by clicking here. Another thought to keep in mind: in the Smartphone Era, you can’t understand, let alone represent, the voice of the customer without hearing from them on the mobile devices that absorb, delight and inform them throughout their day – and on which their individual and collective voices gain expression. For a productive conversation about how advanced mobile-app research can help you get in touch with today’s consumers to generate the data your specific projects require, just click here.

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution you can really keep, put making your passwords more secure on your to-do list. 

To help you see what NOT to do, SplashData, a provider of personal password security apps, publishes an annual list of the year’s 25 worst passwords, based on how many successful hacks have been detected during the previous year. The SplashData lists have real resonance for market research, where data security is crucial. Online panels are vulnerable to scammers who collect rewards by supplying bogus or duplicated survey responses. Bots that take online surveys and disguise themselves by cleverly mimicking human consumers are leading causes of data-distortion.

When it comes to the most vulnerable passwords, as reported by Gizmodo, “123456” topped the list in 2017 -- the fifth straight year it earned that dubious distinction. In fact, consecutive number series starting with “1” accounted for five of the eight most-stolen passwords. “Password” ranked #2 on SplashData’s list for the fifth straight year, and at #19 was its uncapitalized cousin, "password." 

Certain oft-purloined passwords reflect what’s on the collective mind. In 2017 they included “football” (#9), “starwars” (#16), and “dragon,” presumably inspired by "Game of Thrones," at #18. Another popular password was “monkey” (#13), which reclaimed a place in the Top 25 after falling off the list in 2016. Using your pets' names would probably be a better idea.

Some members of the worst-passwords list for 2016 failed to repeat in 2017: “hottie,” “master,” “sunshine” “princess,” and “loveme.” In their place rose “freedom,” “iloveyou” and, in a delicious irony, “trustno1,” which made its debut on the untrustworthy passwords list at #25.

Insights professionals have to trust someone to deliver the fraud-free data they need to help businesses make properly-informed decisions. Instead of accepting online survey fraud as an unavoidable pollutant in their data stream, researchers who think it's important to defend against tainted completes have an alternative in mobile-app survey technology. Smartphones’ unique IDs eliminate duplication and  thwart bots. Other phone features provide ironclad validation: location functions confirm respondents' whereabouts, and a phone's camera lets you request photos of receipts or videos that respondents submit to confirm their whereabouts and their identity as actual human beings. On the back end, be sure to ask your panel providers whether they have in-house experts eyeball each complete as a standard feature of the data-cleaning process.

For a productive conversation about mobile data security, and of all the ways in which mobile-app research can meet your specific project needs, just get in touch by clicking here.

As we begin a new year, perhaps the most certain prediction for the insights industry is that Artificial Intelligence will command a great deal of attention and cause a great deal of anxiety. Nearly every move today's connected consumers make is being tracked and recorded by computers, creating data trails of incredible scale and complexity. Artificial Intelligence sorts and sifts through it all at speeds far beyond the reach of mere human intelligence. 

To get a grasp on the power of Artificial Intelligence to assimilate masses of data and make predictions about human behaviors, consider what happened when AI took on the reigning human champions in the ancient Chinese game of Go.

In 2016, an AI program called AlphaGo played five games each against the world champion, Lee Sedol, and the European champion, Fan Hui. The score was nine wins for AlphaGo, and one for the humans, with Lee notching the lone victory. AlphaGo, which was created by Google's DeepMind division, had mastered the game by assimilating a mass of data representing a specific human behavior -- it had delved into an archive that housed records of all the moves made in thousands of games of Go played by humans. 

But AlphaGo's victory gave it no satisfaction. Algorithms don't feel. Lee, on the other hand, expressed some surprising emotions in defeat: "I have questioned at some points in my life whether I truly enjoy the game of Go, but I admit that I enjoyed all five games against AlphaGo.” 

Artificial Intelligence never stands still, and In 2017, AlphaGo had its comeuppance. It faced off in a 100-game match against AlphaGo Zero, a new Go-playing algorithm designed by Google. The new, improved algorithm won every game, and the online publication Gizmodo cited the shellacking as one of the most significant technological achievements of 2017. That's because, except for being fed the rules of Go, AlphaGo Zero had received zero input from human beings. In three days, it had deduced from the rules alone how the game could best be played. It hadn't needed to crunch a single move made by any other Go player, human or computer.

Do AI's encounters with Go have implications for how we can understand and predict consumer behavior? Artificial Intelligence already can suggest products of interest based on shoppers' past purchases and searches. Could it some day make the very act of shopping obsolete by becoming so expert at interpreting consumers' preferences that they'll simply hand over their purchasing decisions to algorithms they trust to produce more satisfactory outcomes than they could achieve themselves?

Or are the uniquely human capacities for emotion and intuition too fundamental to human satisfaction, including satisfaction with shopping and buying, for a machine to decide rather than merely suggest? It’s significant, and offers a spark of hope for those who value human agency and will, that Lee, the human world champion, had enjoyed playing AlphaGo even though he lost. AlphaGo could not say the same. Nor were the subsequent matches between AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero anything but technological experiments. Those games were devoid of exhilaration and tension and fun for anyone but the algorithms' designers. The loser felt no frustration, the winner felt no pride, and neither took the slightest bit of pleasure from the experience. Artificial Intelligence can dominate a game of Go, but it fails to comprehend the intrinsic qualities that have engaged the game's human players for more than 3,000 years.

The human quirk of being able to enjoy even a losing experience illustrates the complexity of our emotions. Our true humanity lies in our unpredictability, our need for newness and surprise in some things, and for reliability and constancy in others. It’s the role of the insights professional to delve into how these slippery qualities drive consumer behavior. Can Artificial Intelligence model human emotions well enough to provide insights that inform business decisions better than surveys that ask real consumers about their motivations and how they felt about an experience? Will market research remain a job for people who can interpret people? Or is it primed for a complete takeover by extremely intelligent and fast-acting machines?

Perhaps we'll know more by the end of 2018. Meanwhile, start your year with a productive conversation with a real human being about how mobile GeoLocation technology can put you in touch with real consumers at the moment they're shopping or just after they've left a store. You'll get the most vivid data possible at the Point of Emotion® where buying decisions are made. Artificial Intelligence tracks data that's recorded after-the-fact. Data from surveys fielded through a mobile app gives you a window on what a consumer experience was like in-the-moment. Why did a shopper go to that particular store? What motivated the decision to buy or not to buy? What do shoppers say they feel about their experiences, when asked while those feelings are freshest in their hearts and minds? For answers on how to understand the consumer experience all along the path to purchase, and beyond, just get in touch by clicking here.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

Change Is Always Hard, but Getting Mobile Right Is Worth It

How Mobile GeoLocation Takes Research Where You Need It To Be

How Retailers Can Take Shopper Satisfaction Tips from Santa

And here's a Christmas video sung by a chorus of little angels. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

  “Voice of the consumer” is no longer just a market research metaphor, but an audible fact for more than 100 million Americans.

•  A newly-published study by Pew Research Center found that 46% of U.S. adults use voice-control technology to accomplish tasks on various devices.

•  Smartphones were by far the most common tools that consumers command with their voices, according to the study – 42% of adults use voice capabilities on their phones.

•  Talking to other devices was far less common: 14% for computers or tablets, and 8% for stand-alone voice-activated tools such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.

•  The leading “major reason” for talking to machines was keeping hands free, cited by 55% of voice-control users. 23% said it’s simply fun, and 22% cited voice as feeling more natural than typing. Among non-users, 61% said they just weren’t interested in their devices’ voice control features.

•   Only 39% of users said their voice controlled devices responded accurately “most of the time,” so the technology has room for improvement.

 So what does this mean for market researchers who are professionally obsessed with any manifestation of the consumer's voice? It’s especially revealing that nearly a quarter of voice control users like talking to their devices because it’s fun. There’s lots of chatter in the insights industry about the need to reverse declining response rates for online surveys by exploiting consumers’ instincts for fun, via gamification and other cosmetic add-ons to questionnaires. But, as Pew's study shows, when the right device meets the right application, the fun comes naturally. It’s impressive that nearly half of U.S. adults talk to their smartphones. It’s also impressive that if you push a state-of-the-art mobile survey to 1,000 panelists, 500 will begin to take it – a 50% response rate. And of those 500, 475 will stick with the survey until they’ve either completed it or been terminated.

 You may be surprised at how much you can accomplish by seeking the voice of the consumer on the devices that consumers trust as indispensable appendages to their lives. For a productive conversation about how mobile-app research can provide unique approaches to meeting your projects’ specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here.