Here’s an interesting take on how brands are finding new ways to put their best foot forward by making more intense and authentic emotional connections with consumers. 

 

It’s a chat about footwear marketing posted at Forbes.com, with Billee Howard of consultancy Brandthropologie interviewing Adam Petrick, Global Director of Brand and Marketing for the sports shoe company, Puma. The subject is how Puma leveraged celebrity marketing and philanthropy to make an emotional connection with consumers for whom celebrity and responding to social needs both carry emotional weight. Having already partnered with pop star Rihanna for her own signature shoes, Puma added a special new one, with proceeds going to Rihanna's charitable foundation. The brand's aim was to be seen not just as a seller of consumer goods, but as a culturally relevant doer of good deeds.

 

Here are a few quotes from the conversation, highlighting some of the thinking behind Puma's latest effort in emotional connections marketing: 

 

– "The idea of ‘storydoing’ vs. 'storytelling' has emerged….to fuse the increasing need for brands to have a grander sense of purpose beyond the bottom-line with the growing appetite from consumers to be emotionally engaged through authentic stories and experiences that matter.”

 

– “We are in an experience economy,…[which increases] the need to focus less on the WHAT…and more on the WHO and the WHY behind it to create emotional experiences that are purposeful.”

 

– “Not  interesting to us would have been writing a giant check to Rihanna and asking her to be the face of an ad campaign. By being interesting and doing interesting things, we get to take interesting actions that impact our consumers, our culture and also, of course, our business.”

 

– “Rational engagement could be about selling people a product based on a technology or a specific benefit that makes sense from a price standpoint. But I think that emotional connection is now very, very important because when you choose to wear a brand… where the differentiation between the brands is sometimes hard to see, that choice is driven by an emotional connection.”

 

– “You're either familiar with the brand and you understand what it stands for, or you don't. And if you aren't connecting with a brand, then you're not going to choose that brand. So, it’s extremely important to have emotional depth or meaning in order to be in the top consideration set of your target consumers.”

 

– “To do this effectively and authentically, we have to listen more, and we have to pay close attention to what's going on in the culture to deliver products that connect, resonate and matter.”

 

And here are some further observations about how to obtain consumer insights that can effectively inform brands' decision-making as they plan their emotional-connections marketing:

 

– The best way to understand consumers’ emotions is to see and hear them at the moment when they're having an emotional experience, or immediately after, while the experience is still vivid.

 

– Capturing consumers’ in-the-moment emotional responses in real time is a special capability of advanced mobile research, which uniquely can follow and reach respondents wherever they carry their smartphones.

 

– A particularly vivid way to get to consumers’ emotions is to ask them to turn their phones’ cameras on themselves for an in-their-own-words “video selfie." This is how you can see and hear their actual feelings -- and then incorporate the videos when you present your findings to decision-makers.

 

For a productive conversation on how mobile-app research can bring you face-to-face with a pop icon’s fans, or with people who’ve just entered or exited a footwear store, or whoever else you’d like to connect with at the Point-of-Emotion®, just click here.

 

Products that help sick people feel better give drug companies a direct route to forging emotional bonds with consumers. However, there’s a sense among some marketers that traditional messaging along the lines of “it makes you feel better and does it faster and more reliably” is no longer enough.

 

The journal MM&M (Medical Media & Marketing) reports that it’s no longer enough to “simply [inform] viewers about a drug, [and the] condition or disease it treated...Now, the approach to pharma marketing is becoming much more conversational."

 

What’s needed are “campaigns that link to emotional truths about the human condition,” Matt Connor, executive creative director at Wunderman Health, told MM&M Online. “Brands struggle with it. They are accustomed to talking about the benefits.….The challenge is to find a storyline...that truly supports the brand.”

 

Marketing capable of connecting consumers with "emotional truths about the human condition" is a brilliant asset for any brand. And helping brands hone their emotional messaging is the purpose for which mobile Social Ad Testing was designed. Here's how it works:

 

– Target a relevant audience of mobile consumers drawn from a proprietary, nationally representative panel, and place test ads directly in their actual personal news feeds.

 

– Instead of being placed in a simulation of a personal feed, the test ad is injected into the authentic, real world environment in which it will function once the campaign begins.

 

– Now that it's inside the natural news feed, your ad will vie for attention with social posts by recipients' family and friends, along with everything else in the constant social flow.

 

– Start  gathering metrics on observed ad engagement such as clicks, likes and enabling video sound.

 

– Then test the ad's emotional impact by surveying test recipients with unaided and aided recall questions, to understand their in-the-moment thoughts and feelings about the concept and creative elements in detail.

 

If your ad tests well, you're ready to proceed confidently with the campaign, knowing that the emotional connection is there. And if you learn that the ad isn't working as you'd like, you'll have clarity and insight into what needs improvement. For a productive conversation about understanding mobile consumers’ emotions (including connecting with them not just on social media, but at the Point of Emotion® inside a physical venue or right after they've left), just get in touch by clicking here.

 

Not all roads lead to Facebook when it comes to mobile ad spending, but let’s just say it’s a pretty hard destination to skip.

 

In its earnings report for Q3, the social media giant, which also includes Instagram, said it had booked $8.9 billion in mobile ad revenue for the quarter, up a whopping 57% from Q3 of 2016. Mobile ads brought in 86.4% of all Facebook revenue.

 

The price per ad on Facebook/Instagram rose 35%, year-over-year, and ad impressions increased 10%. The company reported that more than 6 million advertisers used the Facebook platform during the quarter, and an additional 2 million-plus placed ads on Instagram. The ads were absorbed by 1.37 billion daily active users worldwide – 16% more than the year before. Taking less frequent monthly users into account, Facebook/Instagram commanded a total audience of 2.07 billion people during the quarter.

 

In a nutshell, there’s a world of competition among marketers to reach a world of eyes glued not just to Facebook/Instagram, but to YouTube and Twitter. To win in such a crowded environment, advertisers need to know the landscape, starting with understanding whether an ad has what it takes to get consumers to notice and be influenced by it. 

 

Social Ad Testing is the advertising research tool that lets you battle-test a mobile ad on major social media platforms even before its release – by seeing how the ad performs in the exact personal news feeds where ads fight for attention amid a torrent of posts from family, friends and other sources.  

 

Social Ad Testing has several defining features that combine to make it unique:

 

– Instead of creating a mockup of a social news feed, it injects a test ad into the actual personal news feeds of members of a mobile consumer research panel, whose profiles fit the demographic or behavioral group the ad is targeting.

 

– This means test-ad recipients experience the test ad just as they experience all other ads – without being aware it’s a test. It shows up in a feed where the ad competes for attention with everything else that’s coming in over social media. 

 

– Social Ad Testing begins by passively collects recipients’ interactions with the test ad, including clicks, likes, shares and turning on audio. The data helps clients draw  important inferences about the ad’s prospects for success.

 

 – Then the test goes a unique step further. Advertisers follow up by surveying the same validated recipients who've been passively tracked, to obtain deeper insights that give the “how” and “why” of an ad’s performance, on top of the “what.”

 

– Recipients answer questions that ascertain whether the ad lifted awareness and intent to shop and buy. And clients also receive important feedback on what recipients liked or didn’t like about the campaign’s concept and creative content.   

 

It’s a fully-rounded test in a natural social media environment, designed to give advertisers confidence. Campaigns that test well are ready to succeed and be worth a solid investment; when they don't test well, the specific "why" feedback you get allows you to rework and retest your ads until your test audience tells you it’s working as intended, and ready to launch.

 

For a productive conversation about how Social Ad Testing and other mobile research capabilities can meet your projects’ specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here.

 

 

 

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

 

8 Steps To Make Big Data and Mobile Survey Data Work as a Team

 

How Fast, On-the-Fly Mobile Insights Power Holiday Retail Success

 

Why Mobile eCommerce & Quality Mobile Retail Data Are Too Big To Fail

 

And here's a Friday tune for a wild ride into your weekend.

 

A  Mobile Commerce Roundup from eMarketer underscores a key point about the role of mobile devices in eCommerce: consumers’ growing willingness to shop and buy via smartphone is something retailers know they can’t ignore. But at the same time, giving shoppers a satisfying eCommerce experience doesn’t come easily, and many retailers are still looking for solutions.

 

– According to eMarketer’s report, Americans will use smartphones and tablets to make purchases totaling $156.3 billion this year, giving mobile a 34.5% share of all U.S. eCommerce.

 

– Through the first nine months of 2017, U.S. consumers had spent $436.1 billion electronically, according to the Census Bureau – up 10% year-over-year from 2016. Sales at bricks and mortar retail outlets had grown just 3.8%.

 

–  60% of North American retailers said they already had a mobile website, and 53% had an app. But most are worried they aren't getting eCommerce right. Only 36.7% of retailers said their mobile shopping sites are “working well.” They rated their apps' performance even lower, with 26.4% satisfied.

 

– From shoppers' perspective, the biggest problem with mobile eCommerce is the small size of mobile screens, cited by 33.7% of respondents.

 

– On the other hand, 64% of respondents said what they like most about mobile shopping is the “flexibility to buy at any time.” That size vs. portability tradeoff is a given of the mobile era, and an on-the-go public has voted overwhelmingly for portability. Other barriers to easy eShopping are slow data, cited by 17%, and limited WiFi access, at 15.8%.

 

With 136.3 million Americans having made mobile purchases in 2016, it’s reasonable to infer that there are big rewards for getting mobile eCommerce right. The same dynamic applies to consumer insights. But you can't just check "mobile" off your list of research tactics and assume it's working well for you. Here are some tips for shopping for mobile solutions:

 

 – First, you aren't shopping for a commodity. Experience, innovation and quality all count in the mobile realm, and if price alone is your guide, you’ll end up getting what you paid for – both in technology and in panel quality.

 

– Like mobile shoppers, mobile survey participants want performance that isn’t hampered by a poor display, unreliable connections, and slow downloads and uploads of survey questions and related multimedia content. The most advanced mobile solutions take all of these into account and address them successfully. Find them!

 

– Distinguish between mobile methodology that involves a “native” app, which embeds the survey instantly into the respondent’s phone, and other approaches, usually called "mobile web" or "mobile optimized." These require a connection to the internet, and expose research participants to the data and connectivity problems cited by mobile shoppers.

 

– Issues stemming from the small screen must be addressed with solutions that reward respondents with a clear display of questions on a single screen, and no need for tiresome scrolling to move through the survey. Don't choose a provider who can't deliver engaging functionality, and make sure you're not just buying technology, but a commitment to client service to ensure you'll get the expert guidance you need to get your mobile projects right. 

 

Above all, savvy mobile solutions shoppers will come to the conversation with a very specific project in mind. Share the details of what you're trying to accomplish,  and why. Expert providers will give you a straight answer as to whether it's feasible. To have that conversation today,  just get in touch by clicking here.

 

‘Tis officially the season for retailers and brands to be at the top of their games and get the most out of the holiday shopping crush. Like the pro and college football teams whose seasons’ failure or success will ride on how they play in November and December, the difference between winning big and merely winning at retail could depend on marketers’ skill at making rapid, in-game adjustments. That means jumping in for quick-hit research that can feed on-the-fly marketing adjustments to maximize holiday revenues.

 

Here’s how the shopping landscape is shaping up:

 

Defining the holiday shopping season as the entire months of November and December, the National Retail Federation expects sales to grow 3.6% to 4% over the 2016 holiday season spending of $678.8 billion for all retail and food goods, excluding automotive and restaurants and drinking establishments.

 

The restaurant/drinking establishment category enjoyed 5.2% year-over-year sales growth in November-December of 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But can they repeat? The National Restaurant Assn.’s recent polling detects some jitters among restaurant operators it surveyed in August, when “their six-month outlook for sales fell to its lowest level in more than a year.” Through the first three quarters of 2017, restaurant/drinking sales had risen 2.9% year-over-year above 2016.

 

It’s never too late to find out what shoppers are experiencing, and to use that intelligence to inform tweaks to holiday marketing. In many cases, you can obtain the real-time data you need in a single day with mobile-app technology that lets you reach a proprietary panel of more than 1.3 million U.S. consumers while they’re out shopping.

 

– Mobile GeoLocation is a particularly valuable gift to holiday season researchers. For example, brands can enlist shoppers to be their eyes in the store aisles, informing them whether product placements and brand displays are in fact what the brand arranged with retailers.

 

 – Retailers can uncover bumps in shoppers’ experiences in time to address issues such as service and ease of finding merchandise. Fast holiday data has unusual force when it comes to decision-making that can maximize sales and increase shoppers' goodwill. 

 

The ideal tool when speed is of the essence is to do it yourself with MFourDIY® – the only all-mobile DIY survey platform. It’s built for sophistication as well as intuitive ease, with complex question types and demographic targeting, and access to the GeoLocation and multimedia features that make mobile research ideally suited to reaching smartphone-centric shoppers to capture vivid responses before recall can fade with time and the pressures of running around to accomplish all the tasks of a typically harried holiday season.

 

It’s also a great way to be proactive and develop data and insights to inform retail strategies for future holiday seasons. For a productive discussion on how to maximize holiday sales down to the last shopping day, just get in touch by clicking here.

 

 

 

The much-discussed upheaval in retail stems from Amazon and other online eCommerce players giving shoppers a smooth experience from product search to checkout. Now bricks-and-mortar chains are playing catch-up by developing eCommerce options and services to complement and augment their traditional, physical stores.

 

A new report on shopping apps from App Annie gives insights into the importance of getting in-app commerce right. Part of the study focuses on usage and user satisfaction among the top five most-downloaded “digital first” shopping apps, such as Amazon and Wish, compared to the top five “bricks and clicks” apps launched by traditional retailers such as Walmart and Target. Among the key findings:

 

 – The average user of "digital first" shopping apps on an Android device engaged in nearly 20 shopping sessions per month during the first half of 2017.

 

– That represented growth of almost 25%, year-over-year, for digital first apps such as Amazon.

 

– The top five "bricks-and-clicks" shopping apps had 15% growth, to about 11.5 sessions per month.

 

– The combined average time spent with Android shopping apps from both categories reached 50 minutes a month among U.S. consumers during the first two quarters of 2017.

 

 –  U.S. users gave digital-first shopping apps an average rating of 4.1 out of 5 in the Apple and Google Play app stores.

 

– That's 10.8% higher than the average rating of 3.7 for bricks-and-clicks shopping apps.

 

The rise of shopping apps makes it crucial to understand their users' shopping experiences. The specific solution to that challenge is Mobile App Tracking. Here's how to harvest these special insights:

 

– Start by identifying the Android apps whose users you want to understand (tracking iOS users' shopping apps is also possible, but involves an additional step or two beyond the automatic identification available on Android). Targeting by apps is 100% accurate.

 

– Brands and retailers can dive deep into how satisfied their customers are with with their own shopping app – or talk to users of a competitor’s app. The App Annie report advises paying particular attention to shoppers' assessments of the functionality of search bars used to look up categories and products, and to the quality of the checkout experience.

 

– Target demographic and behavioral groups your study needs to reach. For example, Hispanic Millennials who use a drugstore chain's app.

 

– Target by combinations of apps – for example, people who have both Airbnb and the Hotels.com app could be an excellent audience for questions about what drives their choices to pick a room share over a traditional hotel room, or vice-versa.

 

– App-targeting in combination with mobile location intercepts has vast potential for honed insights. For example, a quick-serve restaurant brand seeking insights from known customers could talk to its app-users when they’re actually in the restaurant – or in a competitor’s restaurant.

 

For a productive conversation about how Mobile App Tracking can help you accomplish a project’s specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here. 

 

Are Big Data and survey-based research destined to be enemies? It's a much-discussed question with huge implications for consumer insights. Will inconceivably large packets of passive data from consumers' journeys across websites and on their smartphones reveal more about them than they can possibly reveal about themselves when they answer researchers' written questions?

 

It seems more productive to reframe the question. When it comes to Big Data and surveys, can they be used to complement each other to achieve "both-and" insights solutions instead of clashing in a battle of "either-or?" First, here's the gist of what Big Data does:

 

– Amasses incredible amounts of consumer information from multiple digital touchpoints and passive inputs.

 

–  Makes inferences from the data to model consumer behavior.

 

And here's what Big Data omits:

 

– The uniquely human dimension – the “why” and "how" that form consumer sentiment and drive the “what” in what they do.

 

– Thoughts, feelings and motivations, expressed by the people who have them.

 

Now let's look at how Big Data and survey data can be combined for a solution to one particularly thorny research challenge: measuring mobile ads' effectiveness.

 

– First, identify a bucket of Big Data that will be relevant to the task of ad measurement.

 

– In this case, it's a huge list of the unique codes that identify each mobile device.

 

– Next, obtain the identifying code for each mobile device that received the ad.

 

Now you can make Big Data and survey panel methodology work together.

 

– First, match the identifying codes for all the devices that have received the ad (a large bucket of Big Data), against the codes for phones used by members of a proprietary, app-based consumer research panel.

 

– The matches from these two lists make up the ad-measurement study's pool of survey-takers. It represents a synthesis of Big Data (the mobile device codes) with technologically advanced mobile survey methodology (recruitment and engagement of a validated, proprietary panel, exemplified by the more than 1.3 million active U.S. members who use MFour's Surveys on the Go® research app to participate in consumer research on their phones).

 

 – Because each panelist has provided detailed demographic data upon sign-up, advertisers can see who these validated ad recipients are -- and gain important insights into  whether a mobile ad is reaching the right audience. 

 

 – Then, to measure the ad's effectiveness, the advertiser can survey verified ad recipients and ask about awareness of the ad, the brand and the product, along with the consumer's interest in shopping and buying. 

 

 –  Advertisers can take the process even a step further, by recontacting the initial respondents who said they intended to shop. After a period of time has gone by, send these panelists another survey, asking whether they did, in fact, shop for or buy the advertised product.

 

There are many other ways in which turning Big Data and mobile-app survey data into allies can yield illuminating insights. For a productive conversation about how combining the two kinds of data can meet your specific research needs, just get in touch by clicking here.

 

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile. Just click and read!

 

Get To Know Halloween Shoppers While They Break Retail Records

 

6 Tips for Becoming a Savvy Mobile Solutions Shopper

 

Driving and On-the-Go Mobile Don't Mix. It Can Wait.

 

And here's a Friday tune to kick off your pre-Halloween festivities.

Graphic from itcanwait.com.

 

As much as we applaud what the Smartphone Era and innovative mobile-app research technology combined with a dedicated mobile panel are doing for the quality, consistency, timeliness and speed of market research, there is one piece of bad news about mobile that nobody should ignore: smartphones and driving make a deadly mix.

 

This detailed Bloomberg report sorts through the evidence, and concludes that a 14.4% jump in annual traffic fatalities in the United States during 2015 and 2016 doesn’t just correlate with the rise in smartphone adoption, but that drivers’ misuse of phones should be regarded as a significant cause. Miles driven rose just 4.5% over the two years.

 

Fatalities declined from more than 50,000 a year in the late 1970s to a low of about 32,000 in 2011, as automakers upped their games when it came to safety design, and consumers began to demand high safety ratings and features such as anti-lock brakes. But the two consecutive years of rising traffic deaths lifted the annual toll to about 37,000 in 2016.

 

So to users of the Surveys on the Go® app, and to everyone else who’s participating in the Smartphone Era – please be safe. Please remember that there’s no such thing as smart use of a smartphone when you’re behind the wheel.

 

Here are some educational resources:

 

–  "From One Second to the Next," a wrenching short documentary on YouTube by the acclaimed film director, Werner Herzog, puts a tragic human face to the consequences of texting-while-driving. It’s presented by the four leading mobile carriers, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

 

– "It Can Wait” is a website devoted to preventing texting-while-driving. There, more than 21.6 million people have taken a pledge to let it wait when you’re driving and the impulse hits to use your phone.

 

The anguished words of a weeping young man in Herzog’s film pretty much say it all: “Do you know how selfish it was of me to make that decision to text and drive? Knowing every day that you killed two people is one of the hardest things that you can live with….I put my phone away, and I save those two men’s lives. It’s that simple….And it’s that easy for you going forward to save someone’s life.”

 

As much as we appreciate our SOTG panelists’ engagement – which typically generates a 25% response rate within an hour of receiving a survey notification, and 50% within a day – it’s crucial that all of them, and all of us, realize that responding to a survey push-notification or doing any other task on a phone is a no-go when you’re behind the wheel.