“Shibboleth” isn’t a word you read or hear very often, but you’ve probably read or heard fairly often that mobile surveys are only good for short interviews. And that, friends, is a shibboleth.

Here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition of shibboleth (which rhymes with “it’s a myth”): “A custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.” And here’s why it’s applicable to common notions about mobile research:

• It has become a matter of belief that mobile surveys have to be kept short.

• The “particular class or group of people” who hold this belief is consumer insights professionals (although by no means all of them).

• This belief is “outmoded” and “no longer important” -- in fact, it’s damaging to brands’ ability to understand today’s mobile consumers.

Therefore: a shibboleth.

It’s unfortunate, but understandable, that many researchers have this misconception. The majority still are aware of only one type of mobile, when they need to understand there are two, and that they are categorically different. The  “mobile optimized” methodology is, in fact, only good for short surveys, if it’s good for anything. The other type is in-app mobile research, which is beginning to gain awareness, including the fact that it’s a reliable tool for surveys that take 20 minutes or more to complete.

“Mobile optimized” is a new buzzword for the same old surveys: online questionnaires that are housed on the internet. The only difference is that the familiar online methodology is now being repackaged to be accessed on smartphones. It’s essentially a superficial, cosmetic improvement: “mobile optimized” surveys are supposed to make online surveys look and behave better on smartphones.  But in fact, this approach is far worse than the traditional online method it aims to perpetuate.

In a mobile optimized survey, the phone connects to a website where the survey is housed. If that connection is interrupted or load-ins are delayed, the respondent is left frustrated and data quality suffers. That’s why mobile optimized surveys have to be kept short. Every additional question increases the chances that something bad will happen. And users who have no patience for poor performance on their phones will either race through the poorly-functioning survey, or simply drop it.

Instead of turning a smartphone into a miniature version of a desktop or laptop computer, in-app mobile research takes full advantage of smartphones’ unique capabilities. There is no connection to the internet, and therefore no impediment to smooth, user-friendly functionality. The entire survey loads instantly into the phone itself. The respondent then answers the questionnaire offline, where there’s no danger of frustrating delays and therefore no need to keep the survey short.

Go by your own experience as to whether the apps you use give you faster and more reliable experiences than when you use a browser or email link to connect to the mobile web.  If you’re like most people, you get antsy if you have to wait more than a couple of seconds for the content you’re seeking to load in. So in the mobile online (aka “mobile optimized”) space, keeping LOIs short is a must.

With in-app mobile, you’ll place your projects in a completely different category. Based on the experience of clients who’ve already moved to in-app, here’s what you can expect from surveys with LOI of 20 minutes or more:

• Completion rates of 90%

• Drop-off rates of no more than 6.5%

• Sophisticated survey design, including logic and branching

• A proprietary, all-mobile panel of more than 1.3 million U.S. members who are willing to engage fully with long surveys because the app’s fast, smooth functionality gives them a pleasurable experience every step of the way.

• Geolocation and multimedia features that let you do in-location studies in real time, and/or let you test video content such as advertising, or receive “video selfies” in which facial expressions, tone of voice, and in-their-own-words comments vividly bring home all the emotions that underlie consumer attitudes and behavior.

If you enjoy learning by doing, you can design and field an in-app mobile survey with MFourDIY® – the only all-mobile do-it-yourself research platform. Or you can join the Surveys on the Go® panel and take the app for a test-spin from the panelist’s point of view. Download SOTG by clicking here, and start earning some coffee money while you’re experiencing the truth about advanced, in-app mobile for yourself. We’re confident you’ll have an epiphany – but that’s a fancy term we’ll leave for another day.

For a productive conversation about how in-app mobile solutions can meet your specific research needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com. Meanwhile, for an entertaining video introduction to in-app mobile, just click here.

In any profession or trade, it’s easy to get lost in day-to-day demands and lose track of the basic facts and objectives that are your foundations for success. With that in mind, here’s what insights professionals and marketers need to remember about consumer panels. The overarching insight here is that panel fraud and cutting corners to fill quotas will turn survey data into a corrosive force instead of a clarifying light to illuminate business decision-making. Today’s topic is…

The Research Client as Consumer: Be Fully Informed

When choosing sample, insights professionals need to be informed consumers themselves. Here are some useful guidelines.

• Demand transparent information about how the panel you’re buying is sourced, validated and safeguarded to prevent and detect fraud.

• Being an informed research consumer begins with setting a standard for data quality.

• Know how much quality you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve cost savings. The cheapest solutions inevitably are not worth the tradeoff in quality, given the stakes of getting your research right. Can you afford to be penny wise but pound foolish?

• To the extent they value quality, clients need to hold suppliers accountable whenever data quality suffers and the odds of duplicate responses and bot fraud rise.

• You have a safe and simple alternative to online panels, with all their complications, pitfalls and vulnerabilities. It's a proprietary, validated panel gathered around an advanced all-mobile survey app.

• In addition to security, the popularity of mobile apps assures that a well-designed survey app will attract a large, diverse, representative panel that can satisfy quotas for Millennials, Hispanics, African Americans and more. 

Educating yourself about in-app mobile is a lot less complicated than trying to get a handle on everything that makes online sample so slippery. For a detailed, productive conversation about how it pays to access an engaged, alert and representative mobile panel, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com

Have you heard the one about the survey bot that walked into a store and stole a smartphone? That’s OK, neither have we. Everyone knows survey bots don’t own smartphones.

However, they can hijack your budget and your data by breaking into online surveys and posing as human respondents. Online is where computer bots lurk, unleashed by their creators to impersonate consumers, complete surveys, and collect reward payments. Bot fraudsters are very clever about avoiding detection by mimicking how real humans respond to surveys. When survey bots strike you get doubly defrauded – fleeced for the rewards money and the price per complete that’s built into your bill, and left with phony, reality-distorting data you assume is from real consumers.

Bots are increasingly on the march, to the point where one experienced insights professional, Joe Hopper of Versta Research, warns that “if you are purchasing access to survey respondents from panel providers, or from survey software providers…you are probably getting fraudulent data from automated bots or from survey-taker farms.”

So what can you do?

• Stick with online research and hope for the best, or

• Switch to in-app mobile surveys fielded to a validated, bot-free proprietary panel.

A well-designed research app is bot-free for the same reason your lawn or driveway is shark-free. It’s just not the right habitat. Here’s why:

• Each mobile device has a unique identification code. That means a phone can receive and answer a given survey just once. Each completed survey is validated as having been received from the same device to which it was targeted.

• To join an app-based panel such as Surveys on Go® a prospective panelist needs to have physical possession of a smartphone or a tablet. Bots don’t own phones.

• The panelist downloads the app to a phone, then registers to participate in surveys by answering a detailed, in-app questionnaire that elicits granular demographic information to inform targeting.

• Besides shutting out bots, the ID code insures against duplicate responses: only one complete per phone is possible.

• “Mobile optimized” surveys are just like online desktop surveys when it comes to bot fraud. They don't occur in an in-app safety zone; instead, the survey must be taken online, where data fraud lurks.

The good news is that bot fraud is one seemingly intractable problem for which there's actually a proven solution – if you know where to look. For a productive discussion about how in-app mobile can safeguard your data’s health and meet your specific research needs, including advanced location-based surveys powered by proprietary GeoIntensity^® and GeoNotification^® technologies, get in touch at solutions@mfour.com. And for an entertaining video introduction to in-app mobile research, just click here.

Here are some facts about the mobile economy for market researchers to chew on, culled from Pew Research Center’s most recent report on the economics of digital media. Drawing comparisons between 2011 and 2016, Pew's data show that advertisers have shifted their bets decisively to getting mobile right. Investments in desktop advertising  dropped $5.5 billion over five years, while ads targeted to smartphones rose $45.1 billion. 

Is there a lesson in this for the market researchers whose work serves the marketers who are increasingly all-in on mobile? Should researchers follow marketers' lead and reach consumers where they really are (smartphones) instead of trying to interpret data from the increasingly unrepresentative minority who've stayed put on desktops?  Is it OK to assume that what worked best five years ago still works today? One thing is certain: as soon as you decide to go mobile, you can catch up in a hurry once you've done a little research into which mobile methodology to choose.

Here are some of the key markers reported by Pew and compiled by eMarketer. They show how reality has changed, and where it’s going.

• 2011 U.S. ad spending on Desktop-Laptop, $30.4 billion; on Mobile, $1.6 billion

• 2016 ad spending on Desktop-Laptop, $24.9 billion (-18.1%)

• 2016 ad spending on Mobile, $46.7 billion (+2890%)

• Mobile share of all U.S. advertising: 1% in 2011; 24% in 2016

• Desktop/laptop share of all U.S. advertising: 19.6% in 2011, 12.8% in 2016

Clearly, the smart money has concluded that mobile is where people live. So doesn’t market research need to meet them there, too?  With this in mind, here are a few pointers on how to adjust painlessly to the new research realities of the Smartphone Era.

• First, understand that market researchers have realigned before in the face of changing consumer behavior. That’s how the industry went from telephone to online surveys about 20 years ago.

• If your brand is investing heavily in mobile advertising, do some serious thinking about whether you’ll risk a fundamental misalignment between the marketing and market research functions if you don’t make the shift to mobile.

• Next, get up to speed on the state of the art in mobile research, understanding that not all approaches to mobile are equally advanced or effective. Learn about the categorical difference between the two top approaches: in-app and “mobile optimized.”

• Flurry Analytics has found that mobile users spend 92% of their time using apps to access content and carry out tasks, compared to 8% spent using a browser to connect to the mobile web.

• Because they connect respondents’ smartphones to websites to take online surveys, “mobile optimized” research is aligned with the 8% preference level instead of the 92%. 

• "Mobile optimized" is prey to all the problems of the online space, including poor performance -- the commonplace dropped signals and slow load-ins that alienate panelists and diminish completion rates and data quality. .

For a productive conversation about how the in-app mobile approach can align you with the new consumer reality and address your specific research needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Blog bonus: for a quick and entertaining video introduction to mobile research, click here. 

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

Let’s Have a Collegial Debate About MR’s Future

How Gen Z Is Killing Online Research

Why Millennials Don’t Feel at Home with Online Surveys

And here's a Friday music video to get you off to a jaunty weekend.

Bloomberg reports that Millennials (ages 18 to 34) own 11% of the owner-occupied housing in the United States – only half the ownership rate Baby Boomers had achieved when they were in their early adulthood.

People over 55 now account for 53% of owners, and Gen X-ers (35-54) make up 36%. The problem for Millennials is that few Boomers are interested in selling, creating a shortage of opportunities to enter the housing market.

The article holds lots of implications for the wider consumer economy. Will the housing industry step up to deliver houses and condos that Millennials can afford to buy, rather than rent?  If not, will Millennials patiently save up to buy whatever becomes available when it becomes available  – perhaps after elderly householders die and the homes they’ve sat on come up for sale at last? Or will significant numbers of Millennials give up aspirations of home ownership and spend what would otherwise have been home equity on other consumer goods and services?

Whatever the answers might be, brands and companies need to have them, and consumer researchers will have a hard time obtaining them if they don’t take to heart what virtually all Millennials’ have in common: an overwhelming attachment to their smartphones. For research, the challenge is to realize this represents a big opportunity if they can get mobile right. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Track Millennial shoppers at the Point of Emotion® with in-store or after-visit geolocation surveys.

• Understand which social advertising messages test well with Millennial consumers, by injecting test ads unobtrusively into the targeted audiences’ news feeds on Facebook and other social media.

• Target Millennials by the apps they use – for example, you could talk to users of the Zillow app for rental housing searchers about their intent to own a home someday, even if they’re looking to rent right now. Are they setting aside money to eventually buy? Or does their American dream not necessarily require owning their own homes?

Why conduct these projects on mobile? Because you’ll be reaching Millennials in their comfort zone, especially if you make sure to go with research that exploits a mobile survey app instead of merely connecting the phone to a survey that’s housed online. About 90% of Millennials use smartphones and spend the vast majority of their time on mobile using apps. Flurry Analytics reports that the average U.S. adult spends more than 4½ hours per day with mobile apps.

If you’ve encountered problems connecting with enough Millennials, or with the right demographic segments within the Millennial generation, chances are you haven’t tried in-app mobile to get in touch.That’s how you’ll find them, because no matter what kind of residence they may have, they're at home inside their mobile apps. For a productive conversation about in-app mobile and how it can meet your specific project needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

And for a quick, fun video introduction to in-app mobile research, just click here.

It's easy in any profession to get so immersed in day-to-day demands that you lose track of the basic principles that are your foundations for success. With that in mind, here’s a quick reminder of what's most important about consumer panels. 

• The mission of consumer research is to obtain accurate, quality data from validated human respondents in a timely manner, so that it can be mined for insights that contribute to a reliable, realistic basis for business decisions.

• Consumer research is worthless if it generates inaccurate data.

• Inaccurate – or fraudulently inaccurate -- data is not an inconvenience, but a destructive force that threatens to mislead clients into mistaken conclusions and ineffective or even corrosive decisions.

• Suppliers who are cavalier about fraudulent data don't have their clients’ best interests in mind.

• Researchers who tolerate panel fraud are focused on maintaining a smoothly familiar process instead of trying to respond successfully to sweeping changes. We're at a point where mastering change is crucial to achieving real results for the clients and organizational stakeholders who rely on consumer research for a necessary dose of reality.

Educating yourself about in-app mobile is an important first step in mastering new challenges in the data-acquisition landscape. Changing how you obtain data isn't easy, but it's necessary to upholding the core principles and purposes of market research. In today's consumer insights industry, standing still is not an option. For a productive conversation about fighting data fraud and seizing new solutions for your specific needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

Previously:

Mobile 101: Fight Panel Fraud with In-App Mobile (Part One)

Mobile 101: Fight Panel Fraud with In-App Mobile (Part Two)

There’s nothing like a courteous, substantive argument between two market research veterans who are passionate about the industry’s future and how it can move forward and prosper during a time of dizzying change. From these kinds of conversations, only good things can arise.

In that spirit, here’s a summary of one such conversation that took place recently on LinkedIn between Todd Costello, a Senior Solutions Executive for MFour who has long held leadership positions in the Insights Association (the industry’s leading nonprofit professional group), and a consumer insights professional with whom Todd has had a longstanding professional relationship.

You can click here for the full exchange, but here's the quick summary.

As he regularly does, Todd shared a post from the MFour blog with his many LinkedIn connections, as a way of keeping them up to speed on developments in market research overall and in-app mobile approaches in particular.

The blog post that touched off Todd’s exchange was entitled “Why Online Research Is Like a Quarterback Who’s Over the Hill.” It drew an analogy between online research and a great athlete (in this case NFL quarterback Brett Favre) who flourishes for many years but inevitably can’t keep up the same level of performance, forcing his team to make a change. 

Todd’s colleague began by complaining that he’s tired of "'this methodology bad’ vs. ‘our methodology good’ article[s].” He asserted that “every methodology has bias and sampling error. There is nothing fundamentally broken about online research. In fact, it's thriving.”

Todd countered with polite disagreement, touching on some of the key points about consumers’ rapid shift to smartphones and mobile apps – and how that obligates researchers to rethink how to reach them. “Change is always hard but necessary for growth,” he wrote.

Additionally, Todd pointed out some of the specific differences between in-app mobile and online surveys:

• Response rates: 55% for in-app mobile vs. 1-2% for online

• Representation: in-app mobile's essential for reaching Millennials

• Engagement: satisfying in-app mobile performance allows for LOI of 20+ minutes

• Panel fraud: Todd noted that he belongs to five online panels, each under a different identity, and that he receives 200 survey invitations a day, affording multiple opportunities to duplicate his responses (with in-app mobile, each smartphone's unique ID validates and makes duplication impossible)

For an objective point of view, Todd invited his LinkedIn connections to read recent editions of the GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT), in which the authors have been emphatic about the industry’s need to confront serious problems with online panels – and have urged getting mobile right as one of the first and most important steps the industry needs to take.

Todd’s skeptical colleague came away from the exchange satisfied that they’d had a meaningful talk: “Good stuff. Thanks for putting some more meat around the bones.”

This is how it should always go. To have a similar productive conversation about how in-app mobile differs from online and “mobile optimized” online, and how the in-app approach can meet your specific research needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

And here’s a bonus for any classic rock fans out there – a wonderfully tuneful and idealistic song, whose refrain couldn’t be more appropriate: “Successful conversation will take you very far.”

Who’s your favorite scary kid? Billy Mumy’s classic turn in the “Twilight Zone” episode “It’s a Good Life” gets our vote. Linda Blair’s bravura demon-possession turn in “The Exorcist” bears careful consideration. Damien in “The Omen?” Also a candidate. And those ghostly twin girls in “The Shining” are guaranteed to give you the creeps.

Whether they realize it or not, fear of the young will be coming in waves for online research providers and their clients who depend on people taking surveys on desktop and laptop computers. Gen Z, which makes up 26% of all Americans, is rising fast as a consumer force, and how this youthful horde relates to personal computers should scare online researchers out of their wits.

For sellers and buyers of online sample and technology, Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for the first quarter of 2017 reads like something out of H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King. The average member of Gen Z – ages 2 to 20 in the Nielsen study – spent 8 minutes a day going online with personal computers. Only 19% of the Z-ers connected to the internet with a PC even once a week. This represents a huge generational chasm, even though older generations also decisively prefer mobile to PCs.

• Millennials and Baby Boomers each averaged 62 minutes a day online via desktops or laptops. For Gen X members, it was 82 minutes a day.

• Conversely, the average Millennial spent 171 minutes a day using a smartphone and 34 minutes using a tablet -- totaling 3 hours and 25 minutes of mobile digital access per day. That’s more than three times the PC-online connectivity Millennials had on personal computers. Only 50% of Millennials used a PC once a week or more to connect online.

• Gen X members spent 156 minutes on smartphones and 46 on tablets, for 3 hours and 22 minutes of average mobile connectivity per day. 42% did not use a PC even once a week to make connections.

• Baby Boomers also are fully on board with mobile: 149 minutes of digital access on smartphones and 36 minutes on tablets, for a total of 3 hours and 5 minutes a day – triple the time spent on personal computers. 44% of Boomers didn't manage a weekly connection via PC. 

• African Americans and Hispanics remain particularly invested in smartphones – 177 minutes a day for African American Millennials and 193 minutes for Hispanics, putting them 3.5% and 12.9%, respectively, above the generational average.

• Comparing Q1 2017 to Q1 2016, mobile usage has skyrocketed across generations. Millennials’ average daily time on mobile was up 52 minutes a day (a 34% increase) and the gains were 61 minutes (43.3%) for Gen X and a whopping 80 minutes (76.2%) for Boomers.

Nielsen didn’t measure Gen Z’s mobile use because of youth privacy restrictions, but you can safely assume that when it comes to mobile, they’re all-in. The oldest members of Gen Z were just 10 when iOS and Android smartphones came out. Most youngsters won’t remember a world without smartphones.

As we said, these are scary times for online research, and it’s only going to get worse. But there’s still plenty of hope. Knowledge and understanding will overcome fear, and you can start reducing your fear factor immediately by learning more about mobile research. For starters, you’ll need information to make an intelligent choice between in-app mobile solutions that are unique to smartphones and tablets, and “mobile optimized” methods that merely shoehorn online surveys onto smaller screens. For a productive, scare-free conversation, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

And for a quick, entertaining video introduction to in-app mobile, just click here.

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

• Why Online Research Is Yesterday's Hero

• What's the Big Idea? In-App Mobile!

• Key Takeaway from Disney's Big Move: Mobile Apps Rule

And here's a Friday music video to rock your world as you head into your weekend.