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 Tiffany Martinez, Shebani Patel)

Two new MFour team members will help the company keep up with clients’ growing demand for research analysis and ensure that their projects run smoothly from conception through execution.

Tiffany Martinez arrives as a Senior Research Consultant, bringing more than nine years of consumer insights and market research analytics experience. Most recently she was with Live Nation Entertainment for four years, conducting fan intelligence research.Tiffany holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Loyola Marymount University. She likes Disneyland and is a music fan who enjoys concerts and festivals.

Shebani Patel joins the Client Services team as a Project Manager. Her previous career stops include the National Research Group, where she was a Fieldwork Specialist, and the Walt Disney Studios, as a member of its International Marketing team. Shebani earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations with an emphasis in Global Marketing from the University of Southern California and continues to be an avid fan of the USC football team. Her interests also include snowboarding, scrapbooking and sewing. 

Thanks to smartphones' impact on shopping behavior, today's purchase paths are markedly more complex than the traditional model that sufficed before the world became mobile and consumers became continuously connected to it.

A recent report from Digiday illustrates how complex retail shopping is becoming. The article focuses on the proliferation of dynamic pricing, which has introduced a new level of uncertainty, ephemerality and risk to attempts to adjust prices to maximize revenue and market share.  

“The notion of `everyday low prices,’ trumpeted by retailers like Walmart and Target, is being turned on its head,” writes Digiday reporter Suman Bhattacharyya. “In its place, pricing algorithms spit out different figures based on factors that could include time of day, demand, location, competition, and customer buying patterns.” For example, someone using a retailer's app to search for products might see different prices than a shopper in the same retailer’s brick and mortar stores.

The article says that Amazon's algorithm-driven powers of flexible pricing have prompted competitors to introduce dynamic pricing strategies of their own. But there are pitfalls: “While retailers recognize that dynamic pricing is necessary to stay competitive, it comes with the risk of undermining customer trust due to perceptions of price gouging or price discrimination.”

As consumer reality becomes more complex and difficult to pin down in this era of constant consumer connection, a first-party mobile consumer panel whose validated, demographically profiled members can be observed as well as surveyed will bring much-needed stability, reliability and utility to market research. Here are a few examples:

• You can use always-on behavioral data that doubly opted-in mobile consumer panel members authorize MFour to collect, whether it's to focus on their physical journeys in-the-moment, or track them or over weeks and months for insights into their visitation patterns.

• Combining observed location visits with event-triggered surveys lets you communicate with validated shoppers while they’re still in a store, or just after they’ve left. You’ll collect feedback at the Point-of-Emotion^®, avoiding the gaps in time between store experience and data collection that allow recall bias to seep in.

• Identify shoppers by the mobile apps they use, allowing you to target surveys to them with 100% accuracy. Ask about their experiences with the app itself, or use mobile app tracking as an identification tool for targeting digital shoppers whose app use validates their interest in the brand.

But remember: no research technology will help you understand connected consumers if your participants are not fully engaged, representative and validated as accurately-profiled real people. 

Neither observed data nor survey data will yield quality insights if you’re not observing and surveying the people who are most  relevant to the business problem at hand. It may sound counterintuitive, but the solution for understanding a world that presents consumers with complex, multi-channel opportunities to shop and be influenced is to activate research that springs from a single source: an all-mobile panel, organized around a standard-setting mobile research app. Only a demographically diverse market research panel that's consistent with today's always-on, app-dominated information flow can provide the validated representation and proven engagement you need to observe, survey and understand.