Is it time to conduct market research into your brand’s app?

Does it matter how it stacks up against your competitors’ apps?

Of course it matters. Apps are by far consumers’ technology of choice for accessing digital content. Getting them to download your app is like discovering a silver mine. And getting them to use your app regularly is like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A successful app can turn the purchase funnel into a water slide: consumers ride down the digital chute to swim in your revenue stream.

Advanced mobile market research tools for evaluating consumers’ opinions about any app are now readily available. Significantly, they are housed inside an advanced mobile research app that meets validated, first-party consumers in the mobile-app space where they’re most comfortable and most easily engaged. The app is Surveys On The Go® (SOTG) from MFour, which puts consumer insights professionals in touch with a mobile research audience of 2.5 million U.S. consumers who consistently give it the highest satisfaction ratings of any market research app - 4.5 stars out of 5 across more than 100,000 ratings posted at Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Here are some tips on how you can leverage mobile-app research capabilities. 

• Fast-turnarounds are no problem when you’re surveying users of any brand’s app. They’re identifiable by the apps they use, so you can target known app users of any app you want to study.

• Get a thorough audit on your own brand’s app. Are load times fast enough? Does the display and ease of navigation meet consumers’ expectations? Remember, your app’s users are always judging it against their best app experiences.

• Now that you’ve gained intimate knowledge about your own app’s performance, the next step is to replicate the same research to get competitive intelligence on your competitors’ apps.

• Is there dissatisfaction in the ranks of a competitor’s app users? That’s an opportunity, and you can get all the details on what’s making your rival vulnerable on the mobile-app front.

• Does a competitor’s app get higher scores with its users than your app gets with your users? Now you know how much higher you have to set the bar. 

Here’s an example of what a brand can accomplish by upgrading its app. This recent article from Mobile Marketer details how the USA Today Network, a news group of more than 100 local outlets nationwide, achieved significant gains in reader engagement by improving the performance of its mobile website and mobile app.

Identifying and reaching out to first-party consumers by the apps they use opens many other doors to relevant, highly-specific data. And that 100% incidence rate always guarantees you a perfectly streamlined process for the utmost in speed and accuracy. Apps are a great tool for segmenting consumers to gain targeted feedback on any topic that’s relevant to your market research. But more on that later.

The theme music for today’s consumer insights discussion is “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, which was the biggest hit of the year in both the U.S. and the U.K. back in 1983.

“Every move you make, every step you take, I’ll be watching you,” sang the trio’s front man, Sting. He was talking about following a love interest everywhere, to the point of obsession.

We’re talking about following your competitors’ customers everywhere, day by day, week after week and month after month, to gain the competitive intelligence that can help you turn them into your own customers.

How? Not by shadowing them step by step on foot or in a vehicle, but by tracking them remotely and round the clock with complete precision, by leveraging advanced mobile GPS location technology – and much more. Beyond the right technology, you need to track and know the right people – in this case, members of a validated, first-party, all-mobile consumer panel who have given informed consent and opted in twice to allow researchers to track their physical buying journeys in exchange for opportunities to participate in mobile location surveys and earn cash rewards.

• Every move they make across 12.5 million U.S. retail locations is tracked and archived on MFour’s Path-2-Purchase^® Platform.  

• That includes almost every store of the nation’s top 1,000 retailer chains, amounting to about 750,000 store visits each day.

• Each visit is archived in a Consumer Data Center you can tap into to gain context for observed journeys.

• And every consumer who’s tracked can be surveyed at any time, to gain a clear understanding of what’s motivating his or her observed buying journeys – especially visits to the businesses you’re competing against.

Say, for example, that you’re conducting competitive intelligence research for a convenience store chain, and want to focus on Hispanic American Millennials who have incomes of $50,000 to $75,000.

First, you’ll plug in the name of the competing c-store chain(s) whose customers you’re trying to convert.

Then enter the characteristics of the people you want to track — in this case, the above-mentioned ethnicity, age, and income stratum.

The platform automatically shows daily visitation by the targeted group to each competing location, with a graphic visualization comparing it to your own visits on the same day or range of dates. You can see the nationwide competitive picture, or narrow it down to a single DMA. Among the consumer attributes and segments you can study are:

• Brand loyalists: who regularly visits the competing c-store chain, but never comes to one of your own?

• Brand agnostics: who’s going to multiple c-stores, marking them as consumers you can try to win over, if you can understand reasons for their c-store polygamy.

• Frequent shoppers: who goes to c-stores every day, or nearly every day?

• Daypart shoppers: who’s going in the morning, who at lunch time, and who on the way home from work?

• Complete daily journeys: where were c-store shoppers coming from before making that stop? And where did they go next?

Observed location behaviors will tell you a great deal about your competitive landscape, but for the deepest insights you also need to understand the “why.” And for that, there’s no substitute for talking to the same consumers whose buying journeys you’ve been observing.  You can send them a notification of a mobile survey opportunity at any time. The ideal solution is to move from location-observation to location surveys. Respondents are detected when they enter your competitors’ stores, and receive a survey notification as soon as they exit. Response rates are typically 25% within an hour and 50% within 24 hours. The incidence rate can be as high as 100%, because you’ll always have certainty that you’re sending surveys to people who’ve are exactly where you need them to be.

• Do your competitors’ loyalists have different motivations than your own loyalists (who you also can identify, observe and survey by using Path-2-Purchase^®)?

• Is there some pattern of attitudes, preferences and behaviors that differentiates your competitors’ customers from your own?

• Or are they similar enough to be reachable and changeable, given the right messages or incentives?

• What are the characteristics and motivations of brand-agnostic consumers who ping-pong between different stores? And how might they be susceptible to special offers or specially-targeted advertising? 

To sum up, there’s now a tool called Path-2-Purchase® that for the first time lets researchers combine observed location-tracking data with survey data. The data is ultra-reliable because surveys are answered by the same actual consumers whose location journeys you’ve already tracked and observed. The process gives you quality data from real, validated consumers who all take part in your research via Surveys On the Go®, the groundbreaking app that has harnessed the immense capabilities of smartphones for receiving and sending information.

This look at mobile-app location and survey research just skims the surface. For example, we haven’t mentioned how smartphones’ ability to display and transmit photos and videos can bring real-time survey data truly alive and make your reports all the more vivid and impactful. 

In competitive intelligence research, every move you make and every step you take should bring you and your decision-makers closer to the goal of prying away customers and market share from your competitors. To learn more about how Path-2-Purchase® and other mobile capabilities can bring more accuracy and intense meaning to your specific projects, just fill out the brief form below. 

“An understanding of consumer purchase behavior must be based on knowledge of human emotion and include the paramount influence that emotions have on decision-making.”

That’s the fundamental takeaway from “How Emotions Influence How We Buy,” an article in Psychology Today. It carries direct significance for consumer insights pros, especially those who gather competitive intelligence. To understand why people buy one brand over another, or shop one store over another, you have to connect with them while their feelings about a shopping experience are still running high. We call it the Point-of-Emotion^®. To accomplish this you don't need to stand with them physically, side-by-side. Instead, you join them by leveraging advanced mobile market research technology that lets you find and survey shoppers through their smartphones.

Here's how it works:

When your targeted consumers naturally enter a store – yours or a competitor’s – they automatically receive a survey invitation on their phones, via an in-app push notification. Invitees respond far more quickly and attentively to pushes than to the old method of requiring them to check their email for a link to an online survey.

• You can ask shoppers to take a survey while they’re still in a competitor's store, for feedback on experiences they’re having right now with product placement, selection, promotions, service and overall shopping atmosphere. You’re meeting them at the crucial Point-of-Emotion^®.

• Or you can hold off while they're still inside the store, and invite them just after they've left. Within minutes, survey responses will start streaming in, telling you what your competitors' customers experienced in the aisles and at checkout, while it's still fresh in mind. 

• After-visit surveys get response rates of 25% within one hour of notification, and 50% within 24 hours. Nothing else gets you as close to the moment of purchase and the Point-of-Emotion^®.

• To get the most intense emotional feedback, you can ask respondents to make “video selfies” on their phones, in which you’ll see the emotional impact of their experiences on their faces, hear it in their voices, and listen as they put their experiences into their own words. 

• When it’s time to present your findings and recommendations to decision-making stakeholders, mobile video puts them, too, at the customers' Point-of-Emotion^®. Seeing and hearing opinions  from actual consumers grabs their attention and makes the consumer story you're telling more real.

• Smartphone capabilities also give you reliable validation of purchases. Just ask respondents to photograph or make screen shots of receipts, or take pictures of the products.

Follow Consumers All Along the Path-2-Purchase^®

In competitive intelligence, as in other forms of consumer insights research, you can't afford to ask people about shopping experiences they had more than a day or two after the fact. By then, recall has faded and answers turn unreliable. Commonplace screener questions such as “Have you shopped at Target in the past 90 days?” or “Recalling the last time you bought toothpaste, which of these brands did you consider?” will get you recall-biased data that is mainly just guesswork on the respondents' part.

Until now, the research industry has settled for guesswork instead of data because there was no better alternative. But thanks to Point-of-Emotion^® mobile geolocation research, the guessing game is over.

Now you can start your competitive intelligence projects by instantly visualizing your targeted consumers’ actual journeys to more than 12.5 million commercial locations in the U.S., including the top 1,000 retailers.

You’ll see their validated visitation data on Path-2-Purchase^® Platform, a unique tool that identifies who shops at your competitors’ stores, how often, on what days of the week and times of day, and for how long.

Path-2-Purchase^® tracks members of a demographically and geographically representative, first-party consumer panel of more than 2.5 million U.S. smartphone owners, ages 13 and up.

They’re all strictly validated, because they’re all being tracked on mobile. Every member has joined by downloading Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG), the definitive mobile research app, to his or her phone. All research activity, including location tracking, takes place via the app. Consumers have opted in to allow tracking, in exchange for the location-specific survey opportunities you'll be sending their way.

It’s been said that a big part of success lies in just showing up. By applying in-app mobile solutions to competitor insights, you'll show up when and where it matters the most -- standing next to your competitors' customers, asking questions at the Point-of-Emotion^®. To learn more about how to connect at the right place and time for the most accurate, most revealing competitive intelligence insights, just complete the form below.