(L-R Drew, Sally, Jimmy)

MFour is excited to announce three new hires to the team.

Drew Ostrowski joins the MFour team as a Senior Software Engineer focused on developing the back end infrastructure of the company’s proprietary algorithms. He will also be a key part of the modernization and decoupling of legacy software and building new technological components. Ostrowski brings a fluent understanding of the PHP language and a deep knowledge of system architecture and software development. Prior experience includes his achievements at INK, Verys and Driftek LLC, where he built an innovative lead generation marketing site for the financial industry. Ostrowski brings over ten years of experience to the team and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton. Outside of the office he is a family man and movie enthusiast, being a key volunteer for the annual Newport Beach Film Festival.

MFour is also proud to add Sally Zhu to the Operations team, where she will support internal quality control systems and develop surveys for MFour’s innovative consumer research application, Surveys on the Go^®. Multi-talented, Sally has valuable experience with scripting languages such as R, Python, and SQL, as well as knowledge into software like Stata, SPSS, Tableau, LaTeX and Excel. Previously, Zhu was influential in directing and coordinating activities at Citrus College, her first job after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics.

Graduating from the University of California Irvine, Jimmy Sung has over ten years of public and private accounting experience, including time as an Accounting Manager at a global manufacturing company of nutraceutical products. Sung brings advanced accounting skills, ERP system implementations, and advanced Excel knowledge, and he will be directly assisting our CFO with budgets and forecasts for the future. He will also prepare monthly financial statements, oversee month end closing processes, lead the annual financial audit process, and manage vital treasury functions. In his free time, Sung likes to take impressive day hikes all across California, including Mt. Baldy, San Jacinto Peak, and more.

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 Paul, Mehdi, Elaina)

MFour has hired Elaina O’ Mahoney as Vice President of Product, a new position, as well as Senior Engineers Mehdi Eskandari and Paul (Thuy) Nguyen.

O’Mahoney brings more than a decade of experience leading product teams in the tech sector, including serving as Vice President of Product Management for CareerBuilder's Software Suite of human resources recruitment technologies. At MFour she will focus on creating easy-to-use data products that power smart business decisions by leveraging the special capabilities made possible by  Surveys On The Go^®, MFour’s advanced mobile-app research app, and the validated, first-party U.S. consumer panel that uses the app to participate in surveys and opted-in behavioral tracking. O’Mahoney holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Colorado State University and is working on a Master's in Business Administration at Maryville University. Apart from work, Elaina loves to travel and spend at-home time with family. 

Eskandari joins MFour as a Senior Software Engineer. His credentials over the past ten years include Senior Web Developer for finance company American Advisors Group and Software Developer for Dealer Solutions Group. Achievements included helping to create apps and APIs to improve user experiences. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Hardware Engineering from Azad University of Tehran. Eskandari’s tech activities also including publishing his own mobile apps, one of which was among the ten most-downloaded apps in Iran for 2014.

Nguyen, a Senior DevOps Engineer,  has more then 20 years’ experience as a System Administrator and a Senior System Engineer, including positions at Alfa Systems and Sony Network Entertainment. He earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Long Beach, and also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Thuy is an accomplished landscape photographer who also enjoys ping pong, spectator sports and playing drums and guitar in a soft-rock and oldies band.

Welcome aboard to our three new hires. 

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. 

Here are five intensely important questions to ask when you’re deciding how to do consumer market research in today’s always-on data environment.

• How can I get data I can trust, from a consumer panel that’s worth trusting?
• Given the drastic changes in consumers’ purchase paths, how can I identify all the key touchpoints to collect market research data when and where it truly matters?
• When confronted with Big Data and its sources, how can I tell what’s gold from what’s fool’s gold?
• How can I get research projects done fast enough to satisfy my clients or stakeholders?
• With so many providers launching so many products, how can I tell which ones really work?

Now here are five simple responses that will point you toward the answers. 

Related: Market Research for Consumer Products

Trusting the consumer panel/trusting the data:

• Just ask specific questions about where your data is coming from. If the answer is not clear and simple, look elsewhere. Recruiting a quality, representative market research panel is widely seen as a Herculean task. MFour’s solution is simple: people love their phones. They especially love using apps on their phones. Partner with a mobile market research provider who has a great market research app that attracts a quality, reliable engaged first-party all-mobile consumer panel.  MFour’s app, Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG) has been proving its mettle since 2011 and has attracted more than 2.5 million U.S. users. They’ve validated their engagement by giving SOTG a 4.5-star rating on both the Apple and Google app-download sites.

Staying in touch with changing consumer purchase paths:

• It’s a long and winding road that leads consumers to your door, and today that door is often a retail website or a brand’s app instead of, or in addition to, the door to a physical store. The common denominator is the smartphone, which consumers use to go online and keep in their hands, pockets or handbags when they’re offline.

The online/offline distinction is becoming less clear because there’s so much toggling back and forth, as in checking prices on the web while shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. You need to find research tools and products that can take you everywhere there’s relevant, insights-rich data. It may be online or offline, it may be observational or survey-based, it may be event-triggered or not specific to a moment or a place. But it has to be always on, and it has to take you everywhere your consumers are going along the new purchase paths their smartphones are carving for them.

Big Data Tsunami

• Just stick to the fundamentals: who are the actual consumers who are providing the data, when did they provide it, and where were they in online or offline space when they generated it? Big Data will confuse you if you don’t have a clear and simple understanding of its sources. It becomes an extremely useful tool for consumer segmentation and other research purposes if you do have the clear and simple understanding of your data sources. Who, exactly , is generating the data you’re observing or actively eliciting, and how have they been recruited?

Fast and faster research

• It comes down to whether you can connect quickly with known consumers, and how quickly they respond. Waiting for panel aggregators to fill your quotas is slow and leaves a lot to chance. Gathering a first-party consumer panel around a market research app gives you a unified, consistent, always-on data source that’s both validated and fast. You can expect MFour’s SOTG app-users to give you response rates of 25% within one hour and 50% within 24 hours.

Wading through the research product glut

• Keep it simple. If the consumer panel is reliably representative and quick to respond, the under-the-hood technology and methodology that wins their participation and obtains their data is by definition working smoothly and effectively. If you can get everything you need from a single source – the consumers, the technology, versatile use cases and in-house project support steeped in market research know-how from survey design, programming and fielding through analysis and data reporting, then so much the better.

If one-stop shopping sounds appealing, just scroll to the menu at the top of this page and dive in for details on how mobile app research will drive success with your current projects.

(L-R Natasha Tran, Thomas Palompelli, Allison Constable)

MFour has hired three team members in Product Marketing and Sales who will help bring innovative online and offline mobile data products to market and help businesses use them to support smart decision-making.

Thomas Palompelli is Director of Product Marketing, a new position that plays  a key role in defining, developing and launching MFour’s data products. He brings extensive experience in advertising and ad tech, most recently as Director of Product Marketing at FreeWheel, a Comcast company. At MFour, Tom’s portfolio encompasses a wide range of product offerings for brands and retailers who need quality consumer data in all its dimensions. He holds a Master’s degree from Fordham University in Business Administration, Management and Marketing, and a dual-major Bachelor’s degree in Marketing Management and Information Systems and Operations from Fairfield University. Having grown up, attended college and spent his career until now in the Greater New York City area, Tom is beginning a new chapter as a Southern Californian. He enjoys riding a motorcycle and will now face a big decision: to lane-split or not to lane-split. It’s illegal back in New York.

Allison Constable joins the Sales team as a Senior Solutions Executive, advising brands, media companies and agencies on how to harness MFour’s groundbreaking products to drive better insights into advertising effectiveness. She brings considerable experience to addressing clients’ challenges in testing and measuring the impact of their advertising. Allison’s previous positions include Business Development Director for Media & Content at Kantar, Ad Effectiveness Analyst for Buzzfeed and Client Supervisor for Millward Brown Digital.  She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Communication at Elon University. Outside of work, she likes reading and listening to podcasts about human behavior and emotion, CrossFit, yoga, petting every dog she sees, spending time outside, cooking and hosting dinner parties for her friends.

Natasha Tran arrives as a Senior Solutions Development Representative, educating prospective clients about MFour products, including always-on tracking of consumers’ offline and online buying journeys. She previously was a Sales Executive for real estate data company Zillow Group, specializing in driving new business for its advertising platform. Natasha also gained a first-hand perspective on the needs of businesses and their customers in an earlier job as an Assistant Manager for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Riverside, majoring in Media and Cultural Studies, with a minor in Business Administration. Her outside interests include snowboarding and enjoying time with her dog.