(L-R Derek, Ken)

MFour is proud to announce two new additions to the team!

A recent graduate from the University of California, Riverside, Derek Fuller joins the MFour operations team as a DIY Specialist. In his new role, Derek will handle the Live-Chat for the Operations Department and continue to identify and develop ways to expand the “self-help” tool in the application. Derek has valuable experience working in customer-facing roles where his interpersonal and problem-solving skills truly shine. Outside of the office, you can find Derek playing videos on his PC or honing his skills as a DJ.

MFour is also excited to announce that Ken Chen will become a valued member of Operations. Chen graduated from the University of California Los Angeles with a Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics and, using programming tools such as R and Python, Chen will be key in managing and overseeing the analysis of consumer data. He will also maintain internal quality control, manage data files, provide insight into new features, and set up surveys on MFour’s proprietary research platform.

(L-R Drew, Sally, Jimmy)

MFour is excited to announce three new hires to the team.

Drew Ostrowski joins the MFour team as a Senior Software Engineer focused on developing the back end infrastructure of the company’s proprietary algorithms. He will also be a key part of the modernization and decoupling of legacy software and building new technological components. Ostrowski brings a fluent understanding of the PHP language and a deep knowledge of system architecture and software development. Prior experience includes his achievements at INK, Verys and Driftek LLC, where he built an innovative lead generation marketing site for the financial industry. Ostrowski brings over ten years of experience to the team and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton. Outside of the office he is a family man and movie enthusiast, being a key volunteer for the annual Newport Beach Film Festival.

MFour is also proud to add Sally Zhu to the Operations team, where she will support internal quality control systems and develop surveys for MFour’s innovative consumer research application, Surveys on the Go^®. Multi-talented, Sally has valuable experience with scripting languages such as R, Python, and SQL, as well as knowledge into software like Stata, SPSS, Tableau, LaTeX and Excel. Previously, Zhu was influential in directing and coordinating activities at Citrus College, her first job after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics.

Graduating from the University of California Irvine, Jimmy Sung has over ten years of public and private accounting experience, including time as an Accounting Manager at a global manufacturing company of nutraceutical products. Sung brings advanced accounting skills, ERP system implementations, and advanced Excel knowledge, and he will be directly assisting our CFO with budgets and forecasts for the future. He will also prepare monthly financial statements, oversee month end closing processes, lead the annual financial audit process, and manage vital treasury functions. In his free time, Sung likes to take impressive day hikes all across California, including Mt. Baldy, San Jacinto Peak, and more.

RealityMine, the leader in unique insights into the mobile and digital lives of consumers, and MFour Mobile Research, the leader in Behavior Driven Research™, today announced their partnership to launch Connected Consumer Data™.

The solution leverages MFour’s always on all-mobile consumer panel and RealityMine’s RealityMeter to provide clients with a single-source continuous data set that marries observed digital and location behavior with validated surveys. As a result, researchers will be able to draw insights about actual consumer actions, preferences and drivers.

“By adding best in class behavioral data collection technology to MFour’s always on all-mobile consumer panel, they are able to unlock key insights on the mobile, connected consumer,” said Chris Havemann, CEO of RealityMine. “Researchers and advertisers can now combine individual consumers’ digital and ecommerce activity along with their real-world store visits and in the moment survey responses to truly understand the omnichannel shopper.”

“Behavior driven research is where the market is going. RealityMine and MFour’s partnership is integral to making that a reality,” said Chris St. Hilaire, co-founder and CEO of MFour Mobile Research.

The Connected Consumer Data solution delivers a powerful single-source resource covering:

1. Online Data to shed light on what actions consumers take on their smartphones.
2. Offline Data to provide the physical, real-world location of where consumers are taking these actions.
3. Event Triggered Surveys to identify and survey key panelists to find out the ‘why’ behind their observed actions.

The Connected Consumer Data solution delivers a robust feed of always-on behavior that marries key mobile activity—such as web browsing, app usage, shopping and streaming activity—to real-world location data to paint a vivid picture of consumers’ unencumbered actions, preferences and intent.

About RealityMine

RealityMine enables many of the world’s largest market research and media organizations to monitor real consumers on multiple devices, across all major platforms, revealing unique insights from real life consumer behavior. The firm’s RealityMeter can be deployed across Android, iOS and desktop platforms, and is deployed by leading panel owners and research clients across five continents. RealityMine is headquartered in Manchester, England with offices in London, New York and Sydney. For more information, visit realitymine.com.

About MFour

MFour is the original pioneer of Behavior Driven Research™, enabling major brands to understand consumer behavior and attitudes in the Smartphone Era. Its advanced, mobile-app research capabilities combined with its 2.5-million member, first-party U.S. panel delivers data and insights to decision makers needed to overcome challenges, seize opportunities, and achieve business success. The technology MFour creates and the consumer research services and consultation it provides embody an organizational culture and company philosophy focused on Quality, Consistency and Innovation. Learn more at https://mfour.com/.

Press Contacts                                                                                               

Heather Milt                                                                                      
+1 206 200 8207                                                                                
heather.milt@realitymine.com

Samuel Soto
+1 714 754 1234
ssoto@mfour.com

(L-R Paul, Mehdi, Elaina)

MFour has hired Elaina O’ Mahoney as Vice President of Product, a new position, as well as Senior Engineers Mehdi Eskandari and Paul (Thuy) Nguyen.

O’Mahoney brings more than a decade of experience leading product teams in the tech sector, including serving as Vice President of Product Management for CareerBuilder's Software Suite of human resources recruitment technologies. At MFour she will focus on creating easy-to-use data products that power smart business decisions by leveraging the special capabilities made possible by  Surveys On The Go^®, MFour’s advanced mobile-app research app, and the validated, first-party U.S. consumer panel that uses the app to participate in surveys and opted-in behavioral tracking. O’Mahoney holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Colorado State University and is working on a Master's in Business Administration at Maryville University. Apart from work, Elaina loves to travel and spend at-home time with family. 

Eskandari joins MFour as a Senior Software Engineer. His credentials over the past ten years include Senior Web Developer for finance company American Advisors Group and Software Developer for Dealer Solutions Group. Achievements included helping to create apps and APIs to improve user experiences. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Hardware Engineering from Azad University of Tehran. Eskandari’s tech activities also including publishing his own mobile apps, one of which was among the ten most-downloaded apps in Iran for 2014.

Nguyen, a Senior DevOps Engineer,  has more then 20 years’ experience as a System Administrator and a Senior System Engineer, including positions at Alfa Systems and Sony Network Entertainment. He earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Long Beach, and also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Thuy is an accomplished landscape photographer who also enjoys ping pong, spectator sports and playing drums and guitar in a soft-rock and oldies band.

Welcome aboard to our three new hires. 

MFour Mobile Research, the recognized leader in GPS survey technology, mobile market research and consumer data, was awarded the American Business Awards highest honor, their Gold Stevie Award, for Innovation Of The Year for their Path-2-Purchase® Platform.MFour’s groundbreaking technology tracks the physical journey of consumers, with their consent, so brands and retailers can better understand their consumers’ journey.  And since the Path-2-Purchase® Platform is built on top of MFour’s Surveys On The Go® mobile app, these same consumers can be contacted automatically based on their behavior like entering or exiting a retail location.  This combination of observed behavioral data and survey data has been widely touted as the future of market research.

“It’s extremely satisfying to see all the effort and innovation that went into the development of our Path-2-Purchase® Platform be recognized,” said Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s co-founder and CEO. St. Hilaire noted that their Path-2-Purchase® Platform enables clients to harvest first party opt-in location and survey data from more than 2 million pre-profiled mobile consumers whose buying journeys are tracked across 12.5 million U.S. locations, including all of the top 1,000 retailers.

MFour placed ahead of Comcast Business’s ActiveCore SDN platform and Pacific Life’s Claims Concierge and Beneficiary Services platform in their category.  Both Comcast Business and Pacific Life were awarded Bronze Stevie Awards in the same category.

The judges for the Stevie Awards had universal praise for MFour’s Path-2-Purchase® Platform.  “The more data companies know about their target consumer the better. Tracking more buyer behavior on smartphones is a great innovation,” said one of the awarding judges.  The universal praise by the American Business Awards’ judges has been equaled by the commercial adoption of MFour’s technology by corporations eager to understand their customer’s buying decision cycle.

Trying and failing to engage a market research panel that will consistently give you the data you need, when you need it, calls to mind the refrain of a Number One pop hit from 1963: “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.”

It’s not uncommon for researchers to turn to MFour after they’ve experienced sampling shortfalls and busted deadlines due to unfilled quotas. There may not be any actual tears involved, but they're definitely unhappy. The problem often lies in their having used multi-sourced, third-party consumer panels when a single-source, first-party option is the surest, fastest, most efficient way to get projects underway and bring them off, tearless and trouble-free.

MFour’s answer to market research panel recruitment in the Smartphone Era is its signature mobile research app, Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG). This advanced research technology is the focal point for our large, diverse panel, all of the U.S. consumers who have downloaded the app. While there’s much to say about SOTG and the users who engage with it, a few numbers tell the story.

• A 4.5-star rating out of 5, across more than 100,000 individual ratings in the Apple App Store and on Google Play, attests to app-users’ satisfaction with their research experiences.

• Because SOTG users enjoy their research experiences and jump on survey opportunities quickly, clients can expect 25% response rates in the first hour, 50% within the first 24 hours.

• Engagement doesn’t diminish for longer surveys: expect a 95% completion rate even with LOI of 20 minutes or more.

Activating special smartphone capabilities such as location-based in-store and after-visit surveys, and open-ended “video selfie” responses, opens up a data goldmine for the researcher and provides a fun, rewarding use of the phone for the respondent. That’s why SOTG users are eager to participate whenever they receive a survey invitation.

Here are some other data points to consider when choosing between mobile and online panels. 

The younger the consumer, the less likely that person is to even own a personal computer. According to Pew Research Center, 28% of U.S. consumers ages 18 to 29 rely solely on smartphones to get online.

Among consumers ages 30 to 39, 24% are reachable by smartphone only.

It’s even worse if you need to survey Hispanics, 35% of whom are smartphone-only.

Among African-Americans, 24% of consumers are smartphone-only. 

When you decide to go with mobile research, don't make the mistake of treating it as a commodity. Mobile methodologies and technologies are not all the same, and it's essential to choose one that's focused on delivering research experiences that smartphone users will enjoy.

As this article by Jason Spero, Google’s Vice President of Global Performance Solutions, attests, today’s smartphone-centric consumers don’t merely expect to have great experiences on their phones. A a strong majority will be completely unforgiving if their mobile experiences fail to meet their expectations.

“When people have a negative brand experience on mobile, they are over 60% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future,” Spero observed. Conversely, “nearly 9 in 10 smartphone owners who describe a mobile brand experience as helpful or relevant would purchase from the brand again.”

For “brand experience,” substitute “consumer research experience,” and you’ll understand why consumers are often put off and lost as research subjects when their experiences fall short. 

Activating special smartphone capabilities is a mutually-beneficial way to give consumers the kinds of experiences they want.

• Location-based in-store and after-visit surveys let you stop  asking about experiences and behaviors that have taken course over weeks or months. Nobody wants to face questions they can't really answer because they don't have a firm recall.

• Asking for open-ended “video selfie” responses is an invitation to consumers to do what comes naturally on their phones: create media and share it.

• Video answers also are a goldmine of qualitative, experiential data for researchers. Working them into your presentations adds a vivid human touch to the consumer stories you're trying to tell. 

Just think of all these options as party favors you'll get when you make your survey research projects first-party.  

The constant proliferation of new research products, technologies and methodologies for market research is making life increasingly complex for research-users.

But it doesn't have to be. To remove clutter and gain clarity on the available data-collection options, the simple rule to remember is “observe, then survey.” 

MFour handles data-collection simplification like this:

Observe who? Members of the large, representative first-party consumer panel that’s gathered around Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG), the original, most-advanced mobile market research app.

Observe when? Observe endlessly. Always-on GPS location tracking of consenting SOTG users makes it possible. They allow the app to access their phones' location features so they can receive location-triggered surveys.

Observe where? Across all locations of the top 1,000 U.S. retailers, and millions of other places of commercial interest.

Survey who? Whichever segment you need, based on observed location visits combined with detailed demographic pre-profiling. See who's making the observed visits without having to ask.  

Survey when? At the Point Of Emotion^®, the window in which the consumer experiences and attitudes you need to understand remain vivid and recall is at its highest.

Survey where?

• Inside a store if you want to understand what the consumer is thinking and experiencing right now (example: which package stands out on a shelf full of similar products?).

• Or just after observed visitors have left the store, so you can ask about the entire experience, including what they purchased, and why.  

Consumer journeys are more complex than ever, but that doesn't mean the tools for understanding them have to be burdened with complex moving parts such as multi-sourced consumer panels, third-party data and algorithmic analysis that makes inferences instead of seeking out actual consumer feedback.

If you observe closely, then survey intelligently, you can trust that your data captures reality. You'll play a key role in guiding your business to the right decisions, and you'll be able to explain clearly to yourself and understandably to anybody else in your organization how you collected your data and interpreted it to confront the business problems you all need to address.

MFour Mobile Research announces ExperienceCheck™, a new market research product built expressly to help retail and restaurant brands quickly identify and eliminate shoppers’ in-store pain points, clearing the way to greater customer satisfaction and growing revenue and market share.

ExperienceCheck™ captures the in-store shopping experiences of actual consumers to give brand executives and marketers a fast read on what needs to be improved or optimized, from product placement to staff performance, store ambiance and checkout experience.  

Using GPS-enabled, location-triggered surveys, ExperienceCheck™ obtains feedback from opted-in, first-party consumers, just after they have exited a store or restaurant. The combination of observed natural location journeys and event-triggered surveys takes researchers to the Point-Of-Emotion® – the brief window in which validated shoppers’ responses are vivid, immediate, and least vulnerable to recall bias.

“ExperienceCheck™ gives customer experience teams and brand marketers the data they need to understand complex in-store realities quickly, and make persuasive, effective recommendations for fixing problems and maximizing advantages,” said Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s CEO and co-founder.

With ExperienceCheck™, retail and restaurant clients gain insights into the entire customer experience:

• Determine whether interactions with store or restaurant staff are meeting expectations for service, information, courtesy and a human touch. 

• Gain an understanding of how product placement is impacting sales and whether problems are surfacing that cause customers to feel frustrated.

• Learn whether the checkout experience is smooth and giving customers a final touchpoint that leaves them with a positive impression of their visit.

ExperienceCheck™ surveys are powered by the large, demographically representative, first-party consumer panel that uses MFour’s advanced mobile research app, Surveys On The Go®. Retail and restaurant researchers quickly achieve key demographic quotas to represent a diverse public, including Millennials, Gen Z, Hispanics and African-Americans.

ExperienceCheck™ is available in Full-Service and Self-Service options. Both include readymade, templated questionnaires designed for either General Retail or Restaurant research. All users get fast insights into the reasons behind consumers’ validated visits, their shopping experiences and purchasing motivations, and whether they intend to visit again.

All market research consumer panels are not created equal. Only those that reliably represent the segments most relevant to a brand’s success are worth using. 

Less understood is the decisive role research technology and survey methodology play in determining whether a given study will include enough of the right respondents to reflect consumer reality.

Here’s a brief summary of recently published results from an online market research study that illustrates how online methodology is falling short when it comes to demographic representation of key Millennial and Gen Z consumers.

Project: A trade association that represents producers of a food that’s a staple of grocery stores’ fresh-produce departments sought data on U.S. consumers' attitudes, purchase frequency and purchase-drivers for the fresh-food item.

Methodology: A quantitative, nationwide survey that collected about 2,000 completes over the course of about two weeks, obtained from an online panel. Qualifiers were consumers who stated that they play a role in shopping for their household’s groceries.

Segmentation: Using screening questions, the study identified respondents by a variety of demographic categories, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, household income and education.

Shortfall: Only 2% of respondents in the produce-shopping study were ages 18-24. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 9.4% of Americans are ages 18 to 24 – nearly five times as many as were represented in the survey.

Meanwhile, 40% of the study's respondents were 55 and older, when they actually make up 29% of the U.S. adult population. 

The numbers don't align with reality because online research approach is increasingly incapable of fully including the key younger age groups. Pew Research Center reports that 94% of Americans ages 18 to 29 own smartphones, and 28% in that group are “smartphone dependent,” the term for consumers who rely solely on their phones to access the internet. That means more than a quarter of younger Millennials and Gen Z consumers in their late teens and early 20s are off the radar for online studies.

In-app mobile research is much more efficient and capable of representing younger consumers. Here's why:

• Mobile-app surveys are  congruent with their lifestyles: smartphones and mobile apps are Millennials' and Gen Z's preferred portals for receiving information and expressing ideas and opinions.

• They are naturally more inclined to take surveys on their phones, as long as the experience is technologically smooth and problem-free.

• Mobile-app methodology also is a gateway to GPS location-tracking of consumers who give informed consent to have their movements observed from store to store.

• These known, first-party consumers can then be surveyed inside the store or just after they've left. The researcher gets firm validation that they are actually shopping for groceries, and the ultimate payoff is the rich, reliable data captured at the Point Of Emotion^® where buying decisions are made and recall is most reliable.

The key advantage of advanced, in-app mobile research is its ability to combine always-on observational data with survey data to give researchers a rich understanding of validated, first-party consumers. It's the only way to reach them in their natural, mobile-app environment for peak engagement and top-quality survey data.

For an example of in-app mobile's ability to reach younger adults, read about MFour’s 2016 Millennials project, which documented that generation’s opinions about entertainment, money and technology. It demonstrates  the ease and speed with which in-app mobile research can access representative numbers of adults in their mid-thirties and younger.

Another project, on validated shoppers’ experiences on Black Friday, 2018, illustrates the benefits of mobile GeoLocation studies. In that case, consumers were located inside one of five top retailers on Black Friday, then received a survey via their Surveys On The Go^® app as soon as they were observed leaving the store. Click here for an infographic on the Black Friday findings.

To sum up: researchers seeking insights from grocery shoppers or consumers who are shopping in-store for any other product category can now use mobile location-journey data to find validated, first-party research participants who meet their demographic criteria, with young adults well within reach. There's no need to settle for a non-representative fraction of the young consumers whose preferences are already shaping the product and retail landscape and will continue to dominate for decades to come.