(L-R Sharon, Justin, Jack, Carmen)

MFour is excited to announce Sharon Leynes as our latest Senior Research Consultant. She brings 15 years of market research experience in managing and designing custom research studies within various sectors, including automotive, telecommunications, retail, entertainment, hospitality, and medical devices. In addition to her start at a full-service market research company, her recent experience at Johnson & Johnson, The Walt Disney Company, and Kelley Blue Book, has enabled her to design studies which closely align with corporate/marketing strategies. Sharon holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from San Francisco State University. When she’s not in the office, Sharon enjoys spending time with her family and dog. You might find her on a local bike path, catching a play or even in the stands of a baseball game.

Graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, Justin Hadaegh joins the sales team as a Solutions Development Representative. In his role, Justin will work on building our sales teams pipeline through consistent outreach, both through calling and emailing. Justin looks forward to bringing his verbal communication skills, work ethic, past sales experience, and his passion for creating new relationships to his new role here. When he’s not in the office, soccer is one of his biggest passions and he plays any chance he gets.

Jack Felich joins the sales team as our newest Senior Solutions Representative. In his role, he will be responsible for generating new leads, building a qualified pipeline, and overall helping drive sales and facilitating the growth of our business. He looks forward to helping others achieve results and to grow our business, and becoming an industry expert in market research. Jack brings over 3 years of sales experience where he was recognized as a top sales performer at his previous employer. Jack holds a Bachelor's Degree in History and Business Administration from University of California, Riverside. In his free time, he is passionate about fitness, finance, sports, and helping others.

Carmen Pham joins the operations team as a Senior Specialist - Fielding. In her new role, she will be helping internal teams assess feasibility for sampling and also ensuring quality data collection. She looks forward to helping improve process documentation and training. She brings a solid understanding of the project process, research methodologies, and what it takes to ensure quality data. Carmen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Cal State Fullerton. When she is not in the office, Carmen is a self-described “foodie” and she even has an Instagram devoted to trying new foods.

(L-R Juan, Chris, Cheryl, Vanchhit)

MFour is proud to add Juan Toscano to the operations team, where he will setup and manage surveys on MFour’s research platform. In his role, he will ensure the highest quality is being met for the data the MFour collects, and he will manage and track projects astutely to ensure clients request are being fulfilled. Juan brings several years of market research experience where he led teams conducting phone interviews. Juan has extensive knowledge of MS Office Suite, Adobe Creative Suite and has the ability to learn new software easily and intuitively. Juan holds an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts from Cypress College. In his free time, he enjoys working on landscape and perfecting his travel photography skills. 

Chris Gimenez joins our sales team as our newest Solutions Executive. He brings over 7 years of sales experience and looks forward to landing accounts and using data-driven approaches to selling and finding new clients. In his previous roles, Chris has constantly exceeded sales goals by utilizing a consultative sales approach when meeting with new and existing customers. He holds a degree in Economics from California State University. In his free time, Chris likes to snowboard and be in the mountains. In the warmer months, he likes to wakeboard and spend time at the river. He also loves the NBA and NFL and is a fan of the Lakers and the Patriots.

MFour is proud to announce Cheryl Aday as our new Senior Product Manager. We are certainly lucky to have Cheryl as she brings a deep understanding of data analysis and experimental design to our team. In her previous roles, Cheryl has managed more than 40 projects in mobile, web, desktop and IoT projects for small-to-medium size businesses and startups using Scrum, Kanban, and waterfall. She also brings strong writing skills and has a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. In her free time, Cheryl enjoys her passion for board games and was even previously co-founder of the LA Board Games group.

MFour is excited to announce Vanchhit Khare as our new Salesforce Administrator. Vanchhit holds a Bachelor degree in Electronics and Communications from Amity University Rajasthan and a Masters in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton. He brings more than 3 years of experience in the field and always loves to explore new features of Salesforce and trying to establish a rich UI experience for the MFour users. When he’s not in the office, he enjoys taking photographs and trying new recipes. He is also currently learning about music and how music influences our experience.

Diary studies can help you dig deep into hidden details. 

Since diary studies are extremely immersive, they tend to yield insights that can’t be found by using other “one-and-done” popular market research methods.

Here are 3 major benefits of conducting a diary study:

1. They allow you to test the repeated use of a product or service.
   
   For a product or service that is consumed over a period of time, it makes sense to measure the consumer experience over time as well. This is especially true as that experience may very well be quite different from the first time a product is used versus the tenth time.
   
   
2. Participants are in a natural environment for product consumption.
   
   As market researchers, we’re always trying to reduce the amount of influence on participants for our research. Diary studies have the unique advantage to provide unfiltered consumer insights for two reasons:
    
   1. They’re in a situation where they’d normally consume your product.
   2. Participants aren’t being influenced by a moderator and don’t feel like they’re being watched or swayed in one way or another. This is true even if you’re asking for photos and videos of their consumption. It’s done on their own time, and not monitored.
      
      
3. Participant are not subject to recall bias.
   
   Recall bias can wreak substantial havoc on the outcome of research. Fortunately, participants in a diary study are recording their actual actions in-the-moment and not just trying to remember what they thought about previously.

At the end of the day, the best part about a diary study is that it lets you feel like you are actually “walking a mile” in your consumer’s shoes. Learn all about it in our Definitive Guide to Diary Studies.

Market research fuels business. 

By doing market research, you can explore what your market needs, test ideas before investing heavily, track success over time, and adjust your strategy to lift your sales.

Here are 5 great reasons to consider doing a research project with us.

1. You want to create a new product or service
    
   Ever seen a new product flop, hard? It’s not a pretty picture.
    
   Strangely enough, it happens all the time, even at the enterprise level. At MFour, we see this as a missed opportunity. When you understand the true needs of potential customers and existing clients, you don’t fail. The answer is to conduct thorough research ahead of time to capitalize on sales and revenue.
    
2. You want to enter a new market
    
   When a new location, it’s helpful to know what the future looks like. Surveying the market ahead of time is a great indicator for what the health of that opportunity is. For example, if your business is looking into selling in other states, surveying consumers in those states can help you know how well you’ll do. You can also get a sneak peek at the competition, by talking to consumers who frequent your competitors’ locations. It’s great intel.
    
3. You want to target a new type of buyer
    
   It’s hard to know your existing buyers like the back of your hand (what’s that spot?!).
    
   This is even more true with new buyers. Going after a new consumer means accurately understanding their wants and needs, and learning how to speak their language. A survey offers welcome relief. It’s actual feedback from the people you want to reach. And it’s easy to do, you can get the data you need by surveying a consumer panel with hundreds of demographic data points. Let them tell you want they want.
    
4. You want to run a large Out-of-Home advertisement
    
   Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising has the strongest ROI of any media source, if you can measure it. However, understanding ad effectiveness in OOH is more challenging than other channels, because it’s not digital.
    
   Good market researchers can understand the impact of their OOH campaigns by researching what consumers are thinking in the moment the see their signs. Using a consumer group, and sending a survey when they pass you billboard offers real, unfiltered, and accurate feedback.
    
5. You want to beef up your customer service department
    
   Customer service is a higher priority than ever. For retail locations, they’re your biggest key to sales. If your organization wants to win on customer service, it’s important to uncover the issues to solve within the department. Again, we can help you design the right market research survey to figure this out.

Of course, there are many other reasons to do market research. If you’re interested in learning more about our market research solutions, click here. If you’d like to learn about the 7 step process to conducting market research, click here.

Market researchers have always employed ethnographic research methods. But it wasn’t until recently that the right tools were in place for ethnography to scale properly to represent large and accurate consumer populations.

The explosion of smartphones (and the ever-growing big data on those smartphones) is allowing MFour to shift the landscape by providing a number of truths on your consumers.

These facts are free, they don’t require the consumer to provide any information. Why? The data is baked right into their device, and can be gathered in a simple, first-party format - through an app. Innate collection of data is the very essence of ethnography. In fact, ethnography is described as research that doesn’t interact with the participants of a study, but rather lets things happen naturally.

Here at MFour, we use ethnographic research as a starting point to passively gather data about consumers’ digital activities and real-time/historical locations. Then, we add GPS-intercept surveys on top of the data to allow us to pull deeper insights from consumers at various points throughout their path-to-purchase.

This supersedes traditional forms of market research, because it gives you massive insights into consumer behavior. Data that used to be unattainable, without a lot of disruption, is now at your fingertips. And it’s fueling an exponential rise of ethnography across the industry. 

Will you be doing more ethnographic research this next year?

(L-R Yi-Wen, Fernando)

MFour is excited to announce two new team members! 

Fernando Martinez is joining the operations team, where he will field our client surveys and maintain the quality of our data through data scrubbing. He has valuable experience with data analysis and was part of the team that made Tel Aviv, Israel the number one market globally for Bird Rides Inc. Fernando is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside where he holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Economics. In his free time, Fernando enjoys watching sports, especially his favorite baseball team, The Dodgers, and listening to any of his favorite music genres.

Graduating from the University of Texas at Dallas, Yi-Wen Cheng joins the MFour team as a Senior Data Analyst. She brings 8 years of data analytics experience in different industries including consultant, healthcare, and logistics. As our Senior Data Analyst, she will perform data visualization where she will extract data from data lake using her different technical skills and present data and transform it into information used in a meaningful way. She looks forward to standardizing work procedures and create a data directory for entity-relationship modeling. Yi-Wen is someone who thinks outside the box and MFour is certainly excited to announce her as one of the newest members of the team!

(L-R Holly, Roman, Lindsay)

MFour is happy to announce three new additions to the team!

Holly Freeman joins the MFour Finance team as an Accounting Specialist who’s primary focus will be on accounts receivable, accounts payable, and any other accounting functions that Jimmy and Brian throw her way. Holly has been working in the accounting profession in various capacities since 2013. She got her start in public sector taxation working for the Canada Revenue Agency where she quickly moved up the ranks as the junior-most staff member to be promoted to a senior resourcing position. She has since moved on to private sector accounting after moving to Southern California from the East Coast of Canada. In her free time, Holly is an avid runner who has completed 6 marathons and 30 half marathons to date. She is also a creative writer with several short stories published in different anthology collections.

Graduating from the University of California, Irvine with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and Social Behavior, Lindsay Fawcett joins the MFour team as a Fielding Specialist, where she will work on fielding our surveys to consumers and ensuring quality data for MFour clients through thorough data scrubbing. She brings her experience as a Research Assistant where she focused on emotion and social behaviors by using primary qualitative data such as open-ended survey questions and in-person interviews. Last summer Lindsey volunteered in Nepal at a women-owned and operated farm in rural mountain villages and received an award for excellence from the Global Service Scholar Program. On her downtime, she loves reading fantasy and science fiction and having game nights with her friends.   

MFour is excited to announce Roman Balakin as our new Quality Assurance Manager. Roman holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from MAMI State University, Moscow, Russia, and Scrum Master Certificate form cPrime. Roman brings 4 years of QA manager experience and looks forward to building a rockstar QA team along with developing a robust automation test coverage. In his free time, Roman enjoys traveling the world with friends and embracing new cultures. He is also a Co-owner of a motorcycle repair and tuning studio that has been in effect for over 3 years.