Reed Gubernick (L) and Laura O' Campo

Golden State is America’s team in the pro basketball playoffs, but not by a landslide.

With the pro basketball season approaching its climax,  MFour sought consumer insights on viewership and team loyalties from more than 5,000 Millennial and Gen Z fans nationwide who are watching the league playoffs. Asked who they’re rooting for, Golden State was a fan favorite in 21 states, Cleveland was the top pick in 18 others, Boston won 7 states, and Houston just one – its home state of Texas.

A plurality of fans in Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah said they were watching the playoffs, but not rooting for any of the four semifinalists.

In the nationwide popular vote, fans were rooting for Golden State over Cleveland by a narrow margin of 27.5% to 25.7%, followed by Boston (20%) and Houston (15.5%). Golden State enjoyed coast-to-coast support, sweeping ten of the 11 Western states in which the majority of fans had a rooting preference, but also winning the South and pulling support from two Midwestern and two Northeastern states. Cleveland enjoyed fan support in all regions except the West, where only Montana fans opted for LeBron James and company.

In a nationwide survey of 5,032 Millennial and Gen Z respondents who are interested in pro basketball, 82.1% said they are frequent watchers as this season’s league playoffs near their climax. That includes 65.6% who report watching “nearly every game,” and 16.5% who said they’ve watched every game.

Frequent viewership ran even higher in states that are home to the four teams still in contention: Texas (94.7%), California (90.6%), Ohio (90%) and Massachusetts (88.5%).

But viewership also was intense among respondents living in some states that don’t have a pro basketball team, let alone one that’s still in the playoffs. That includes 93.7% of respondents in Virginia who said they have watched every game or nearly every game; 89.3% in Washington state, 84.7% in Kentucky, and 83% in Missouri. Survey respondents were ages 13 to 40.

As the conference finals continue with Golden State against Houston and Cleveland against Boston, rooting interest is fairly evenly distributed: 27.5% of respondents want Golden State to repeat as champion, 25.7% are for Cleveland, 20% for Boston and 15.5% for Houston. An additional 11.3% said they are watching but not rooting, since the team they wanted to win the championship has been eliminated.

Golden State owed its favorite-team status to female respondents, 38.8% of whom said they were rooting for the champs to repeat. Men, who made up 87.6% of all respondents, actually gave a rooting edge to Cleveland over Golden State, by 26.2% to 25.9%. 

Fans in Massachusetts appear to be the most deeply-invested in their home-state team, with 84.8% saying they are rooting for Boston. Among Ohioans surveyed, 78.3% are pulling for Cleveland.  Meanwhile, Golden State commands loyalty from just 53.1% of the Californians surveyed, and Houston has the rooting allegiance of just 44.8% of the respondents from Texas.

One big difference is that Boston and Cleveland each has its home state to itself, while Golden State and Houston both share their states with other teams – three others in California, and two others in Texas.

But even Massachusetts and Ohio residents who aren’t rooting for their home-state teams are rooting for somebody: not a single respondent from either state said he or she had no rooting interest at all. In California, 8.6% of fans said they’re continuing to watch the games even though they have no rooting interest, and 9.2% of respondents from Texas are watching but not rooting.

As for their views on individual stars, 40.7% of all respondents predicted that James Harden of Houston will win the league’s Most Valuable Player award, followed by 39.9% predicting LeBron James of Cleveland and 8.5% predicting that Kevin Durant of Golden State will take the honor.

The basketball fans surveyed also are heavily oriented to other professional sports: 87.5% said they are interested in pro football, 62.6% have an interest in baseball and 38.6% are fans of ice hockey, where the playoffs also are approaching a climax and competing for viewers. Professional soccer commanded interest from 30% of the basketball fans surveyed, and stock car racing had a 21.6% share.

Most of the fans who are watching the basketball playoffs said their interest doesn’t extend to the celebrity news surrounding one of the players, Cleveland center Tristan Thompson, whose relationship with reality TV star Khloe Kardashian reportedly is in jeopardy. Only 39.5% expressed an opinion as to whether the couple would stay together; 60.5% chose the answer, “I really don’t care, I have better things to do with my life.”

Methodology: The study was conducted May 10-14, fielded to validated, first-party U.S. consumers ages 13 to 40, who participate in research using MFour's mobile survey app, Surveys On The Go^®. The 15-question survey was begun by 17,972 consumers nationwide, of whom 5,076 met qualifying criteria; 99.1% of qualifiers completed the survey. Mean completion time was 2 minutes, 59 seconds. 

As Pew Research Center has documented, consumer insights research needs to be mobile to reach the representative slices of the public that successful market research requires. But there's a deeper layer of understanding insights professionals must master to get mobile right. Here are some tips as you explore mobile research solutions: 

• Understand why “mobile research” is not a generic term.

• Learn the key differences between the two kinds of mobile – “mobile optimized” (also called “mobile web”) and mobile-app.

• Be aware that “mobile optimized” research is traditional online research conducted on smaller devices. It’s a new vehicle for the same old online research environment.

• Consider data that shows consumers' overwhelming preference for the mobile-app environment over the mobile-web environment.  

• eMarketer reports that U.S. adult smartphone owners’ average daily mobile app usage exceeded mobile web usage by a ratio of 5.6 to 1 in 2017 – 145 minutes for apps, and 26 minutes for mobile web.

• This year, the gap is predicted to grow to 6 to 1 as time spent rises 6.9% for apps while staying level for mobile web.

The decisive takeaway is that when you’re talking about consumers inhabiting a mobile environment, you’re actually talking about people living in the mobile-app environment. Asking them to take surveys via the mobile web is tantamount to not using mobile at all.  

To dig deeper into the differences between mobile-app research and mobile-web/mobile optimized research, check out this blog post, “Mobile 101: Why Native App Technology Beats `Mobile’ Optimized.” Or you can set up a one-on-one demo to explore the whole story about how MFour’s mobile-app solutions can meet your own specific research needs. Just click here.

A new equation in research: app-tracking + GeoValidation® = unprecedented data

Targeting the right respondents is crucial to getting good research data, so MFour Mobile Research has developed a new pipeline to push surveys to consumers based on the smartphone apps they use. Hoteliers, for example, can find out what people who’ve downloaded their chain’s reservation app liked or didn’t like about their most recent stay -- from broad impressions to the most detailed particulars about check-ins, minibars and bellhops. Or they can eavesdrop on what a competitor’s app-using customers say about its own amenities and services.

The value of surveying app-users about their consumer experiences extends across all business sectors. MFour’s leadership position as the first and only all-mobile research company means it can infuse app-targeting surveys with even greater capabilities. We power all of our clients’ projects with the most advanced mobile-survey technology. With us, they can leverage the nation’s most effective survey panel – the million-member active panel that uses MFour’s own signature smartphone app, the 4.5-star rated Surveys on the Go.® You get fast, reliable results that fully include typically hard-to-reach demographics such as Hispanics and Millennials.

The app tracker accesses the 50% of our panel that uses Android devices. Knowing the apps they have, we can lead you to a rich, new vein of fast, reliable data. Rather than asking panel members which apps they use, MFour’s app-targeting is based on passive tracking that automatically identifies and verifies the apps they’ve downloaded. This tool becomes even more powerful when combined with another proprietary feature, the GPS-enabled respondent-locator we call GeoValidation®.

GeoValidation® certifies when panelists have arrived at a given retail outlet or other location that’s relevant to your survey. You can then field a survey to be completed on the spot, before respondents have finished shopping, or shortly after they’ve left, while the experience is fresh in mind. So a market researcher seeking insights about a hotel-chain’s customers (or its competitors’ customers) doesn’t have to ask hotel-app users to recall their most recent stay, which may have happened months ago. Pairing app-tracking with GeoValidation,® this study would proceed from a sure understanding that its subjects were current guests, or travelers who had just checked out. To call the resulting data “premium” would be a serious understatement.