Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you jump into the Labor Day weekend. Whatever else you do, don't forget to check at the bottom for something to mobilize your spirits and get the weekend off to a festive start. 

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MR Needs to Fight the Right War

And here's a Friday tune to send you humming and smiling into a much-deserved long weekend.

History buffs will remember the Maginot Line.

It was a string of imposing fortifications the French built along their border with Germany during the 1930s. German forces had poured into France during World War I, and it took four years of brutal fighting on French soil to defeat them. The Maginot Line was built to ensure that this would never happen again.

What the French high command failed to anticipate was an end run executed at unprecedented speed with unprecedented military technology. Blitzing German forces flanked the Maginot Line in the early days of World War II, and France fell in a matter of weeks.

Now market research has its own Maginot Line. Like the one in France, it’s an impressive and righteously intended piece of defensive architecture that will have little effect because it has been built to fight the last war.

This new line of defense is a recently-announced system designed to protect researchers from buying bad internet sample. It aims to address an acknowledged crisis in MR – intensifying gaps in the quality, reliability and demographic reach of online panels. The program has a laudable goal -- to test and vet the panels that participating suppliers provide to the project's sponsor, a company that aggregates and brokers panels for research projects. It aims to help buyers become better-informed and more secure about what they’re getting, because they’ll be able to check the panel-quality ratings and rankings the system generates. It’s also designed to give suppliers a strong incentive to address any issues that are holding down their panels’ scores.

The concept makes sense. If it works as intended, it undeniably will be very helpful – in fighting the last war.

As recently as the late 2000s, such a quality-rating program for online panels would have mattered a great deal. At that point, personal computers still ruled. But that’s no longer the case. It’s the smartphone that now permeates our lives – and by all reckoning its domination will continue, in what we can confidently call the Smartphone Era.

People want to do their business and experience their pleasures on mobile. They want to be informed and entertained on mobile. They want to relate to friends and family on mobile. They want to be on mobile.

You can verify this just by looking around. But if you need harder evidence than what your eyes tell you, the Pew Research Center provides the numbers: 72% of American adults owned smartphones as of early this year – including 86% ages 18 to 29 and 83% ages 30 to 49. These are the prolific consumers, present and future, who are crucial for researchers to reach.

The process that undergirds online surveys is a throwback to ancient times – well, to a time before 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Online research calls for panelists to be notified by email, click on a link, and take a survey that’s housed on a website. It’s not a process that suits a smartphone-using public. Citizens of the smartphone era vastly prefer apps to web connections that can be fragile and data-consuming. Properly-designed survey apps will cache content, allowing respondents to answer questions offline. Mobile panelists receive push notifications -- the friendly doorbell ring of the smartphone era – rather than emails, which often are seen as annoyances to be ignored or quickly skimmed through and tossed out.

Again, the numbers bear this out: comScore’s report, “U.S. Cross Platform Future in Focus – 2016,” found that by the end of 2015, mobile apps accounted for 56% of Americans’ engagement with digital media, measured by time spent on all devices combined. Factoring in web connections as well as apps, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Americans’ time with digital media.

Given these facts, the stark logic in market research comes down to this:

• The bedrock basis of this industry is its ability to communicate with a representative slice of the public. 
• Today’s public overwhelmingly presents itself on smartphones and occupies itself with smartphones.
• Therefore: Is there any reason to believe that taking surveys is the one form of communication and information exchange that people would rather not conduct on mobile?

It’s a mistake, however, to make a simple blanket statement that surveys targeted to mobile devices will solve the panel crisis. The key is using an advanced mobile approach rather than one that's been quickly slapped together in order to catch up.

It takes special software engineering and survey-design work to make questionnaires display and function well on smartphones. The look must be clean, the content instantly understandable. The survey can’t slow the respondent down or let boredom seep in. It must be the kind of glitch-free experience that smartphone users expect and demand from everything that’s on their devices.

It almost goes without saying that, given the public’s obvious preferences, a quality mobile survey experience will attract and engage panelists in numbers that now elude online research.

But can anything comparable to the quality checking that’s now being advocated for online surveys be duplicated for mobile research?

It’s already being done, in the most natural way: mobile survey apps come with a built-in, completely public quality control system. They’re downloaded from the App Store (for iOS users) and Google Play (for Android). These are among the most prominent storefronts on the digital town square, and each provides a public bulletin board where people who use an app are free to comment on it and rate their experiences for all to see. To get a good idea of a survey app’s functionality and its panel’s satisfaction and engagement, researchers need only do what they’re best at – listen to a slice of the public.

We’re not in a position to evaluate how well the new project to rate online panel quality will fulfill its aim. All we can say is that it’s aiming at the wrong target. It’s asking market research to shoot arrows into the past, where even a bullseye won’t help it succeed in the present, or position it to prosper in the future.

The French put a lot of thought, effort and expense into the Maginot Line. It may have been the strongest bulwark the world has ever known. And it would have worked perfectly – if only time and technology had stood still.

What’s more annoying than having to pay for stuff you don’t want and don’t need?

• Cable channels you don’t watch

• Ticket “convenience charges” that have nothing to do with convenience

• MR interviews that terminate but still cost you money

• Suspect data from unreliable respondents

MFour can’t help you with the cable company or the ticket sellers, but it’s our business to make sure you get full value for your research dollar – and that a research rip-off never happens.

• We don’t charge for terminated interviews. When you say you need 200 successfully completed, quality interviews, we make sure that’s exactly what you get.

• You come to us for clean data, and clean data is all you pay for. We examine every interview, toss out the bad, and only charge for answers that generate insights.

At MFour, the job isn’t just building better research. It’s building up an industry by setting a better standard.

• Quality assurance: advice on phrasing questions and industry best practices to get the best insights
• Live support: connect with a specialist to help you build your survey and answer any questions
• Live data cleaning: we remove flawed responses as they come in — you only pay for successful interviews

Sabrina Santos has joined MFour’s team as Administrative Assistant, with a wide range of responsibilities supporting senior management and staff. Sabrina has a degree in marketing management from Biola University and was previously an assistant manager and senior buyer for Crossroads Trading Co., a fashion retailer and exchange. Welcome aboard, Sabrina!

We have to admit it – this blog sometimes gets a little, shall we say, impatient, because many market researchers seem to be tiptoeing instead of sprinting into the smartphone era.

We’ve been the leading pioneer and evangelist for all-mobile research since 2011, and we have to confess that we thought the whole MR world would have converted by now from online to mobile surveys.

But recent reports from the front lines in other industries remind us that it’s never easy for industries to change course. In each case, an industry not only has all the evidence it needs, but has in fact  accepted the reality that smartphones’ rapid, revolutionary and by all indications lasting ascendancy has brought its business to a tipping point. But human nature makes it hard to make a big change, even when our heads tell us we must – and each of these industries has been slow to act on what it knows.

Now it’s dawning on all business sectors that the time for deliberating over how to confront the mobile age is running out. Better adopt a good mobile plan and act, because the world is moving too fast for laggards to catch up.

With that in mind, here are current snapshots of three hugely important, bedrock industries that face the same imperative that confronts market research: the need to transform in order to succeed the smartphone era.

Legacy News Media

Publishers such as the New York Times and Tribune Publishing, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, have known for a decade or more that print subscriptions and advertising were trending down, with no reason to expect a reversal. “Digital first” became a watchword – but only now are they acting upon that realization with the utmost urgency. Tribune recently changed its name to tronc, which stands for “Tribune online content” – signaling that it’s now dead serious about putting the digital horse before the print cart. The New York Times is going through a major restructuring, including significant staff cuts, as it pushes hard to “build a more digitally focused newsroom and to reach [a] stated goal of doubling digital revenue by the year 2020,” as company leaders put it to the staff in a memo. For “digital,” use “mobile,” because that’s where most digital news traffic comes from.

Banking

Business Insider reports on findings from its recent survey of Millennials about their banking preferences. The findings spell trouble for that cornerstone of American commerce and culture, the bank branch, because Millennials hold the future of banking in their hands – literally. The study of 1,500 Millennials who have bank accounts found that, for them, “the shift toward mobile banking apps is particularly pronounced…they are walking into their banks’ traditional bricks-and-mortar branches less than ever before.”

The report, titled “The Digital Disruption of Retail Banking,” predicts that bank branches will become obsolete and that “banks that don’t act fast are going to lose relationships with customers” as they turn to outside digital banking services.

“The smartphone will become the foundational banking channel. As the primary computing device, the smartphone has the potential to know much more about banks’ customers….The smartphone goes everywhere the user goes, has the ability to collect user data, and is already used for making purchases. Therefore, the banks that will endure will be those that offer banking services optimized for smartphones.”

Thanks, BI, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Marketing

MediaPost’s MobileInsider blog cites a study by Adobe showing that 28% of e-commerce revenues this year come from mobile transactions – a near-doubling in just two years. Despite this obvious accretion of a mobile snowball into a mobile avalanche, MediaPost’s Gavin O’Malley reports, “just one in five companies around the globe have a defined mobile strategy that goes back at least 12 months….That’s despite the fact that 63% of brands believe the quality of their mobile experience is more important than that on desktop….[and] despite the fact that the number of brands that see themselves as `mobile first’ has increased 200% since 2014!”

What’s happening with marketing sounds a lot like what’s happening with its crucial partner, market research.

Market Research

To repeat: Yes, we do get impatient at times (well, a lot, actually) that the inevitable transition from increasingly outdated and ineffective online surveys to all-mobile research isn’t moving as quickly as we’d expected when we began pioneering all-mobile in 2011. But we don’t want late adopters of mobile research to feel bad, because as these examples from news media, banking and marketing show, you are hardly alone. But, as these other industries are realizing, the deadline for action is coming on fast. The consequences of not acting are severe, but the opportunities for those who can and do act are substantial.

We’ll give the last word on this to the late, great David Bowie. Click and enjoy one of his signature songs, “Changes.”

Blake Skorich has joined MFour as a Solutions Development Representative, the newest hire in the company’s ongoing expansion.

Blake augments the team that helps current and prospective clients understand how MFour’s survey technology combined with its all-mobile panel will bring them the data and insights they need. He arrives after working in digital marketing and operations for shoe merchandiser Deckers Brands. Blake has a bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Northern Arizona University. Welcome aboard!

The path to purchase increasingly begins on a smartphone. Shouldn’t the path to consumer insights start there as well?

Fresh evidence about the smartphone’s rising importance to shoppers comes from Google, which recently analyzed searches related to back-to-school shopping. As reported by MediaPost’s SearchMarketing Daily, Google found that shoppers carried out 60% of those searches on mobile devices during July – up 35% from July, 2015.

What’s more, 85% of views for back-to-school shopping videos posted by retailers such as Target took place on mobile devices.

At stake: $75.8 billion in expected back-to-school buying.

Let’s briefly follow the logical path this suggests for market research.

1. Market research is concerned with discovering what consumers think, feel and do.

2. Therefore it behooves research professionals to approach consumers where they most frequently do this thinking, feeling and doing.

3. Consumers increasingly are doing their primary thinking, feeling and doing while looking at their smartphone screens.

4. Therefore – well, the conclusion is inescapable, don’t you think?

The only question remaining is how best to accomplish mobile research.

What’s crucial to know is that it is not a commodity. One mobile approach is not as good as the next. So researchers need to do some shopping of their own.

Take a hint from those millions of back-to-school shoppers. Google “mobile research.” Skip the paid, “sponsored” links at the top, look at the natural search results, and see what you find.