How awesome would it be if you, the market researcher, could get answers from hundreds of shoppers at the exact moment they’re standing in the exact aisle of the exact retailer needed to extract the exact kinds of data you need? And fast?
It would be incredibly awesome. Which is exactly why MFour Mobile Research has made this kind of research possible – make that not only possible, but easy and affordable -- by introducing MFourDIY™ -- the nation’s first do-it-yourself survey-building platform for all-mobile research.
An ongoing series of webinars is introducing the industry to what MFourDIY will let you do, and how to do it.
The topic Thursday morning was Building GPS-Enabled Surveys: A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today.” In 27 minutes, 19 attendees representing major firms and brands learned how to add this powerful survey-building platform to their research arsenals and pinpoint those thousand particular panelists
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MFour’s Chief Product Officer, Michael Smith, started with a brief overview of why MFour’s product – advanced, highly-engineered conduits for fielding surveys strictly to smartphone users – marks a leap ahead for survey-based market research. In a nutshell, because the smartphone has eclipsed desktop and laptop computers as the public’s favored information and communications device, MFour can deliver the panel you need with far more speed and demographic range than any method that’s not fully mobile.
In Smith’s words, MFourDIY clients get “the largest panel” (one million active members, all via mobile devices) with “the most detailed demographics” (including complete, rapid responses from otherwise hard-to-reach groups such as Millennials and Hispanics).
Smith walked the webinar attendees through two actual examples to show how they can build a GPS-enabled survey. MFour had conducted the two surveys within the previous two days, testing its guarantee that you can, in fact, get “A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today” -- or at myriad other retail chains or other business venues on a list we’re adding to all the time.
It starts with having the right advanced technology: a proprietary process MFour calls “GeoValidation”®, which, Smith said, goes several steps beyond other GPS-enabled survey systems. MFour paints a locator bullseye right on the store, verifying that respondents are in fact at the store. That triggers a push notification on their smartphones inviting them to take the survey either on the spot or soon after they’ve finished shopping.
Smith noted that competing location approaches are no more than a tenth as accurate as MFour's GeoValidation®. Others will tell you whether an individual is within about 100 to 150 feet of the store; ours certifies that the person is right at the entrance. You don’t have to ask respondents whether they’ve recently been to a Walmart. You know for a fact that’s where they are right now.
In our test surveys we sought 1,000 completes from members of our mobile panel who’d been GeoValidated at Walmart stores. We were looking for 200 to respond while they were still shopping, and another 800 to answer questions after they’d finished shopping and left the store.
The survey included instructions guiding both groups to the products and displays we were focused on. Some questions tapped into the multimedia capacity of smartphones – researchers can send pictures, video or audio as the basis for questions, or ask respondents to take photos or make audio or video recordings to enhance their answers.
We captured our thousand-respondent quota easily. The average completion time was less than 13 minutes for the in-location survey, gathering 200 in-store interviews within four hours; for the after-visit survey, we landed the 800 responses we needed within 7 hours – even though we’d told those panelists it was OK to take up to 48 hours.
In-Store and After-Visit surveys are just one facet of how MFourDIY is democratizing mobile research. Take advantage of a special introductory discount at mfourdiy.com, and register for one or more of our upcoming webinars, including MFourDIY: Getting Started on May 4 and 18, and Mobile Panel 101: Reaching Millennials and Other Elusive Demographics on May 10.
Click here to learn more about MFourDIY™
