Marketing departments are strapped for time. They also struggle to measure the impact of the great work they do. 

We feel you. Especially when it comes to measuring ad effectiveness before launching a campaign. It’s a crucial step. Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when it's time to launch the campaign: 

1. “We just don’t have time for testing. Run it!”
2. “Trust me, I know exactly what I’m doing. You’ll see.”
3. “We already tested these ads by asking around the office, people love it.”
4. “There’s no going back now, we’ve already invested too much in this campaign.”
5. “These ads aren’t something you can easily measure since they’re in video format.”

Fact is, the companies that measure ad effectiveness pre-launch and on-launch gain valuable insights. The feedback allows them to tweak (or fully pivot) to maximize their results.

With MFour, you can measure out-of-home ads and measure social media ads in one place.

Think of ad test as an insurance policy. 

If the test goes well, awesome. If it doesn’t - well, thank goodness you tested first. Right? Because if the test goes badly, then you just saved your ad budget from getting dinged by several millions of dollars. Cue the music, you’re now a hero!

So, will you measure your ads before your next campaign?

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 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?

Unique Location Solution Provides More Accurate and Comprehensive Understanding of Consumption Behavior in Bars and Restaurants Nationwide

CHICAGO and IRVINE, Calif. — Jan. 30, 2019 — IRI®, one of the global leaders in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, and MFour, the leader in mobile market research, today announced their partnership to launch the IRI OnSights™ solution. The new solution leverages MFour’s first-party GPS location information to collect verified data on hundreds of thousands of consenting mobile panelists’ visits to U.S. bars and restaurants. This location information adds a powerful new dimension to the vast consumer behavior data and insights available on the industry-leading IRI Liquid Data® platform.

“On-premise consumption and purchasing are becoming increasingly important to the consumer packaged goods industry,” said Robert I. Tomei, president of Consumer and Shopper Marketing for IRI. “Providing IRI clients with measurement and insights on this activity is critically important to ensure that they have an accurate view of both consumption (share of stomach) and purchasing (share of wallet) as they design campaigns. Until now, marketers’ understanding of consumer purchasing and consumption behavior at restaurants and bars has been largely anecdotal, which is often inaccurate and limits marketers’ ability to build comprehensive insights that include both on- and off-premise activity.”

“MFour’s leading location platform collects millions of weekly retail visits from hundreds of thousands of our validated Surveys On The Go® app panelists, providing unparalleled accuracy of on-premise consumer behavior insights,” said Chris St. Hilaire, co-founder and chief executive officer of MFour. “Combining observed passive insights — which show where mobile consumers go — with active insights from survey data capturing the ‘why’ behind their visits is a holy grail for market research. We’re so pleased to join forces with IRI to develop one of the most important advances in mobile research.”

IRI OnSights leverages consumer insights from more than 1 million verified MFour app users who have chosen to provide their locations and de-identified demographic information. The data from MFour’s voluntary and verified users provides IRI clients with both passive tracking insights and actively collected survey information to improve marketers’ understanding of consumer behavior in U.S. bars and restaurants:

• Passive Insights: GPS location data collected from MFour has tracked more than 3.8 million visits to bars and restaurants since spring 2018, and the number of tracked visits will continue to grow weekly. MFour provides accurate measurements of how frequently establishments are visited, and how much time consumers spend at each. For example, IRI OnSights uncovered that the fast-growing brew pub/bar and grill segment represents 5 percent of all U.S. bar and restaurant visits and has a strong Midwest skew, especially in Green Bay, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Cleveland.
• Active Insights: The solution also incorporates data from custom and syndicated consumer panelist survey responses collected through the MFour mobile app, providing valuable insight into the motivators of a restaurant or bar visit, what was consumed and visitor demographics. According to a recent study of on-premise data, 39 percent of visitors aged 21 and over consumed an alcoholic beverage during their last visit to a bar or restaurant (excluding quick-serve restaurants), 54 percent of those drank beer, and nearly half of beer drinkers chose a domestic craft beer.

Using these two data collection methods, the OnSights solution delivers robust insights that marketers may analyze to better understand their customers, deliver more appropriately targeted marketing communications, design more effective promotional campaigns or uncover unmet consumer needs.

“IRI is thrilled to partner with MFour to deliver this powerful new solution,” said Carl Edstrom, senior vice president and principal of Survey and Segmentation for IRI. “Layering verified data that measures on-premise consumer behavior into IRI’s expansive collection of point-of-sale, loyalty card and consumer panel data assets adds a new level of granularity for more powerful insights that drive growth for IRI clients.”

About the IRI Partner Ecosystem

IRI fundamentally believes that delivering differentiated growth for clients requires deep, highly integrated partnering with a variety of best-of-breed companies. With this in mind, IRI works closely with a broad range of industry leaders across multiple industries and sectors to create innovative joint solutions, services and access to capabilities to help its clients more effectively collaborate and compete in their various markets and exceed their growth objectives. IRI is committed to its partnership philosophy and continues to actively enhance its open ecosystem of partners through alliances, joint ventures, acquisitions and affiliations. The IRI Partner Ecosystem includes such leading companies as 84.51°, Adobe, The Boston Consulting Group, Clavis Insights, comScore, Data Plus Math, Edison, Experian, GfK, Gigwalk, Google, Ipsos, Jumpshot, Mastercard Advisors, MaxPoint, Omnicom, One Click Retail, Oracle, Pinterest, Research Now/SSI, Simulmedia, SPINS, Univision, Viant and others.

About IRI

IRI is a leading provider of big data, predictive analytics and forward-looking insights that help CPG, OTC health care organizations, retailers, financial services and media companies grow their businesses. A confluence of major external events — a change in consumer buying habits, big data coming into its own, advanced analytics and personalized consumer activation — is leading to a seismic shift in drivers of success in all industries. With the largest repository of purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data, all integrated on an on-demand, cloud-based technology platform, IRI is empowering the personalization revolution, helping to guide its more than 5,000 clients around the world in their quests to remain relentlessly relevant, capture market share, connect with consumers, collaborate with key constituents and deliver market-leading growth. For more information, visit www.iriworldwide.com.

About MFour

MFour serves major brands, advertisers and market research firms with the technology and unrivaled consumer connections required for reliable insights and smart decision-making in the Smartphone Era. The company’s groundbreaking Path-2-Purchase® Platform is the first integrated research suite to combine observational data and survey data, enabling clients to track opted-in consumers’ daily location journeys and then target them for mobile surveys based on the places they’ve visited. Insights professionals get a unified view of the “what,” “where” and “when” of consumer behavior, together with the crucial “why.” MFour introduced its signature Surveys On The Go® mobile research app in 2011, and began attracting a growing first-party, one-source U.S. consumer panel that now numbers more than 2.5 million. Respondents’ deep engagement drives fast, same-day responses and unique capabilities such as rapid, real-time surveys conducted during and immediately after store visits. The result for clients is insights free from recall bias and captured at the Point-of-Emotion® where buying decisions are made. Learn more at mfour.com.

# # #

IRI Contact:
Shelley Hughes
Phone: +1 312.474.3675

MFour Contact:
Mike Boehm
Director of Communications
Phone: +1 714.754.1234

How awesome would it be if you, the market researcher, could get answers from hundreds of shoppers at the exact moment they’re standing in the exact aisle of the exact retailer needed to extract the exact kinds of data you need? And fast?

It would be incredibly awesome. Which is exactly why MFour Mobile Research has made this kind of research possible – make that not only possible, but easy and affordable -- by introducing MFourDIY™ --  the nation’s first do-it-yourself survey-building platform for all-mobile research.

An ongoing series of webinars is introducing the industry to what MFourDIY will let you do, and how to do it.

The topic Thursday morning was Building GPS-Enabled Surveys: A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today.” In 27 minutes, 19 attendees representing major firms and brands learned how to add this powerful survey-building platform to their research arsenals and pinpoint those thousand particular panelists

.

MFour’s Chief Product Officer, Michael Smith, started with a brief overview of why MFour’s product – advanced, highly-engineered conduits for fielding surveys strictly to smartphone users – marks a leap ahead for survey-based market research. In a nutshell, because the smartphone has eclipsed desktop and laptop computers as the public’s favored information and communications device, MFour can deliver the panel you need with far more speed and demographic range than any method that’s not fully mobile.

In Smith’s words, MFourDIY clients get “the largest panel” (one million active members, all via mobile devices) with “the most detailed demographics” (including complete, rapid responses from otherwise hard-to-reach groups such as Millennials and Hispanics).

Smith walked the webinar attendees through two actual examples to show how they can build a GPS-enabled survey. MFour had conducted the two surveys within the previous two days, testing its guarantee that you can, in fact, get “A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today” -- or at myriad other retail chains or other business venues on a list we’re adding to all the time.

It starts with having the right advanced technology: a proprietary process MFour calls “GeoValidation”®, which, Smith said, goes several steps beyond other GPS-enabled survey systems. MFour paints a locator bullseye right on the store, verifying that respondents are in fact at the store. That triggers a push notification on their smartphones inviting them to take the survey either on the spot or soon after they’ve finished shopping.

Smith noted that competing location approaches are no more than a tenth as accurate as MFour's GeoValidation®. Others will tell you whether an individual is within about 100 to 150 feet of the store; ours certifies that the person is right at the entrance. You don’t have to ask respondents whether they’ve recently been to a Walmart. You know for a fact that’s where they are right now.

In our test surveys we sought 1,000 completes from members of our mobile panel who’d been GeoValidated at Walmart stores. We were looking for 200 to respond while they were still shopping, and another 800 to answer questions after they’d finished shopping and left the store.

The survey included instructions guiding both groups to the products and displays we were focused on. Some questions tapped into the multimedia capacity of smartphones – researchers can send pictures, video or audio as the basis for questions, or ask respondents to take photos or make audio or video recordings to enhance their answers.

We captured our thousand-respondent quota easily. The average completion time was less than 13 minutes for the in-location survey, gathering 200 in-store interviews within four hours; for the after-visit survey, we landed the 800 responses we needed within 7 hours – even though we’d told those panelists it was OK to take up to 48 hours.

In-Store and After-Visit surveys are just one facet of how MFourDIY is democratizing mobile research. Take advantage of a special introductory discount at mfourdiy.com, and register for one or more of our upcoming webinars, including MFourDIY: Getting Started on May 4 and 18, and Mobile Panel 101: Reaching Millennials and Other Elusive Demographics on May 10.

Click here to learn more about MFourDIY™

Click here to view crosstabs

Click here to view topline

August is a busy month for MFour, with new hires, rollout of MediaMatch 360° technology, and news of our impending expansion to Newport Beach. Here are some of MFour's recent press mentions below, including coverage by Quirks, Research-Live, and Daily Research News Online.

New Hires

MFour welcomed Andrea Han to the team as Senior Research Consultant. Han comes with 16 years of quantitative market research experience, click here to see press coverage by Research-Live

MediaMatch 360° Rollout

MediaMatch 360° launched, a product that integrates media matching technology, validates consumer behavior, and tests recall & behavior with a real-time view of consumers. Click here to see press coverage by: Quirks, by Research-Live, and by Daily Research News Online

MFour Expansion News

MFour is moving to a 14,000 square foot office in Newport Beach , effective November 1, to accommodate the growth of the company and its staff. Click here to see press coverage by Quirks and Daily Research News Online

“Company doubling research and development staff in 2015”

National mobile market research company MFour Mobile Research is tripling its office space and relocating to larger offices to support the rapid growth of the business and its staff. The move will be effective November 1, 2015 to Newport Beach Gateway, where the offices will overlook Newport Beach’s Upper Back Bay Preserve.

MFour will occupy more than 14,000 square feet of space in its new building, compared to the 3,800 square feet it occupies at its current space. When asked about the move, MFour CEO Chris St. Hilaire explained, “it is important to get our growing staff on one floor so we remain collaborative as we continue to establish best practices for mobile market research designs and fielding.”

The larger space reflects the collaborative nature of the company and its core values, featuring an open floor plan, 3 conference rooms, quiet rooms for sales staff, along with work-life amenities such as an on-site gym and bistro.

MFour Mobile Research is the mobile market research industry leader. With its native app, Surveys on the Go® and the largest mobile panel in the industry, MFour leverages the advanced technologies found in todays mobile devices to acquire more accurate research data and reach the hardest-to-find demographic groups.

For more information about MFour Mobile Research, please visit mfour.com or call 714.754.1234 and ask for Allison Fletcher.

“Largest U.S. Mobile Panel Integrates Media Matching Technology for Breakthrough Media Measurement Tool”

COSTA MESA, Calif. - MFour Mobile Research, the mobile market research industry leader, recently announced MediaMatch 360°™. This new product validates consumer exposure, tests recall & behavior with the first 24/7 real-time view of consumers, on the nation’s largest all-mobile Smartphone panel. Clients see total ad exposures and survey panelists in real-time.

• AdMatch™: Validate exposure by region, age, gender, measure ad recall & overall appeal, monitor behavior shifts & report data in real-time dashboards.

• VideoMatch™: Measure source and video content exposure, gauge effectiveness against competitors & view immediate dashboard reporting in real-time.

• RadioMatch™: Gauge on-air talent with follow-up surveys, validate music exposure by region, age, gender & measure drive-time media consumption against competition by MSA/markets.

Measure the world around you through your mobile device.

For more information about MFour Mobile Research, please visit www.mfour.com or call 714-754-1234 and ask for Allison Fletcher.

MFour Abandons All-Mobile Panel in Favor of "Beeper Technology."

Stating emphatically, "Mobile is dead...the return of the beeper is near," MFour CEO Chris St. Hilaire announced today the company will immediately close its 600,000 active person, mobile panel in favor of beeper-respondants wearing "super cool" belt clips.

While recent statistics indicate that more than 75% of Americans carry smartphones and that more people access the internet through smartphones than online desktop computers, even more Americans own belts, and there's hardly anything to attach to them, according to St. Hilaire.

"I own one smartphone and four belts. I have a blue one, two blacks ones and a reversible one that I grew out of after the kids were born and I stopped having time to work out...but that's not important right now," said St. Hilaire.

The new four-step methodology is brilliant in its design: First, respondent attaches a beeper to their belt and waits for a "beep beep." Second, they hear a "beep beep" and immediately head to the nearest phone booth. Third, they insert a quarter and dial the number back. Fourth, they take the survey.

MFour expects the technology to take hold even quicker than online panels are dying. For questions about our super cool beepers, open your rolodex, look up our number, head to a phone booth and give us a call. Either that or fax us. Happy April 1st everyone.