Halloween is shaping up as a sweet treat for brands and retailers, according to estimates from the National Retail Federation.

The NRF predicts a record $9.1 billion in sales of the products that make Halloween Halloween – a bewitching 8.3% revenue boost from the $8.4 billion spent in 2016. The NRF reports that the average U.S. consumer expects to spend $86.13 on candy, costumes, decorations and pumpkins, and other products that define the holiday.

– Predicted spending breakdowns include $3.4 billion for costumes, $2.7 billion for candy and $2.7 billion for decorations – including pumpkins.

Brands and retailers looking for insights into this week’s last-minute Halloween shoppers can look to mobile research as a right tool for the job.

– In-store intercepts using smartphones’ GeoLocation feature catch shoppers in the store aisles. There, you can ask them about your own Halloween displays, or a competitor’s.

– After-visit surveys, taken just after the shopping experience, are another excellent opportunity to obtain insights while the emotions of shopping and buying are still fresh, vivid and immediate.

– Millennials, many of whom are now parents of little trick or treaters, are uniquely accessible on an all-mobile panel.

– Fielding a survey just after Halloween to hear about consumers' holiday experiences could yield immediate and useful insights, including how emotional impressions from this Oct. 31 might influence shopping and buying plans for Halloween, 2018.

– Preliminary estimates for the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday season also look promising: Deloitte predicts spending will break the $1 trillion mark, with a 4% to 4.5% increase over 2016.

For a step-by-step account of how MFour helped a major brand maximize sales of a special holiday snack food by identifying the right aisle for its placement, just click here and scroll down to "case study." 

And for a productive conversation about how mobile app technology and a proprietary, all-mobile panel can accomplish your specific project needs, just click here.

Here are some key points to consider when you talk to suppliers of mobile research technology and mobile sample.

– The best approach is to talk very specifically about the research you’re trying to accomplish, and see which solutions the mobile provider can bring to bear.

– Some grounding in the broader basics of mobile is important, but even If you’re exploring mobile research for the first time, you’ll pick up a lot of the background info as a by-product of talking about your specific needs.

– First, make sure to establish which kind of mobile the supplier is offering, because there are two approaches, not one. The first is mobile-app research. The other is known as “mobile web” or “mobile optimized.” Compare the specific solutions you’re offered by vendors of either approach, with special attention to panel sourcing.

– An important comparison is how each approach addresses low online response rates, poor data quality, panel duplication and survey fraud. Mobile-app takes the process offline by embedding surveys inside the app; mobile-optimized keeps the questionnaire on the internet.

– Get a sense of whether the mobile provider wants you to change your own processes and procedures, such as survey design. And get a clear understanding and strong assurances about the consultative help you can expect along the way. Experience counts, so determine how much experience the provider and its staff have with mobile research processes.

 – Does the vendor advise or require you to sacrifice some sophistication to carry out mobile research? The principle to remember is that panelists can readily handle longer, more sophisticated mobile surveys – but only if the display has perfect clarity and the respondent can move through it with intuitive ease. Mobile consumers demand excellent experiences on their phones, and will reward excellent survey functionality with strong engagement, However, they'll punish poor functionality by disengaging, perhaps permanently.

The fun part in talking about mobile lies in getting to know the specific tools –GeoLocation for real-time, in-store or after-visit surveys, harnessing smartphones’ video and photo capabilities for real-time insights and ironclad validation, and a great deal more. To have that conversation, just get in touch by clicking here.

The mass-adoption of smartphones frames every conversation about mobile research.

Pew Research Center reports that 77% of American over 18 owned smartphones as of the end of 2016, rising to 92% for those 29 and under. 

A comScore study that factored in 13- to 17-year olds put smartphone penetration at 81% in December, 2016 – nearly double the 42% of Americans who’d adopted smartphones as of 2011. It only affirms that the younger the group, the tighter its embrace of mobile devices.

Instead of "gotta get mobile," however, the conversation should now be about what, specifically, mobile can do for your research. If you're attending TMRE: The Market Research Event in Orlando this week, be sure to stop by the MFour booth to talk to some of the world's leading experts on advanced, app-based mobile research.

Vardan Kirakosyan, MFour's Vice President of Operations, can speak with unrivaled authority about survey design, programming, fielding, analysis and reporting. Senior Solutions Executive Scott Worthge and Solutions Executive Blake Skorich are brimming with ideas about how mobile technology and an all-mobile panel can handle research scenarios. Tell them what you need to accomplish, and they'll put the best mobile approach at your disposal. So come on by for a one-stop, A to Z immersion in what mobile-app research can do, and how it's done.

If you're not going to TMRE, you can have the same kind of productive conversation about how you can harness mobile-app technology and panel to meet your projects' specific requirements, just 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!

Here's How To Get Trackers in Tune with Mobile

Looking Into Mobile? You Deserve Project-Specific Answers

Quality People Deliver Quality Client Service

And here's a Friday tune to give your weekend a slinky start.

Ruth Bruno (L) and Shannon Coey

Ruth Bruno and Shannon Coey have joined the MFour team -- Ruth as a Solutions  Executive who’ll help clients find innovative mobile answers to their projects’ needs, and Shannon as a Fielding Expert who’ll help ensure successful execution of those projects.

Ruth arrives with more than 14 years’ experience in the market research industry. Previously she was a Senior Account Manager at Actionable Research, where she worked extensively with clients in the dental health industry. She’s an alumna of Irvine Valley College and the Southern California College of Medical and Dental Careers. Ruth’s passions include spending quality time with her daughters and doing charitable work with Helping Hand Worldwide, where she leads a team that distributes food to the disabled and elderly. She also describes herself as a “huge sports fanatic,” both spectator and participatory.

Shannon brings proven organizational skills to the crucial function of fielding clients’ projects reliably and consistently to deliver quality data. Besides her work for MFour, she is the Volunteer Coordinator at the nonprofit Community Foundation of Orange, handling recruitment and coordinating assignments for a roster of 350 volunteers. She’s also passionate about the arts and creativity, including creating hand-crafted signs and elegant calligraphic script. She has a side business, Scribbled Calligraphy, that puts her artistry to work. Shannon holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication from Chapman University.

Welcome aboard, Ruth and Shannon!

A hit song from 35 years ago has a lot to say about the state of consumer tracking studies today.

“Should I Stay or Should I Go,” by the Clash, has stood the test of time brilliantly – as confirmed by its prominent, recurring use in the Netflix sci-fi series “Stranger Things,” one of the biggest hit TV shows of 2017.

In the show, a teenager plays the song for his younger brother and tells him it will “totally change your life.” The little brother then gets hurled into a nether world where he has to hide from a predatory monster – and softly singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” to himself helps him avoid panicking.

“Should I stay or should I go now?

If I go, there will be trouble,

And if I stay it will be double.”

The Clash’s refrain has echoes for trackers because they are at a crossroads where disruptive technological change is clashing with tracking studies’ mission of providing continuity while compiling a long-term, ongoing measure of consumer sentiment.

The disruption is consumers’ wholehearted and near-universal adoption of mobile devices, relegating the desktop and laptop computers that power online research to secondary status. As one expert, Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa, put it in explaining why PC sales are fading, “the whole mechanism of consumer computing usage is through smartphones. We go to sleep and wake up to them. You maybe open your personal laptop once a day, but your smartphone is an indispensable item in your daily life.”

Trackers have long been conducted as online studies, but online is being supplanted by mobile research, for the simple, unavoidable reason that it’s growing hard to find enough respondents who spend significant time in front of a PC. Problems with the representativeness and engagement of online panels are now widely acknowledged, prompting experts such as the editors of the twice-yearly GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT) to advocate a greater emphasis on mobile surveys as the best solution.

But trackers present a special problem. They are predicated on yesterday’s and last year’s data being directly comparable with the data being collected today and tomorrow. Should you stay with the online methodology that generated your historical data? Or should you go with mobile, which you’ll need to keep your trackers properly aligned with today’s consumers? 

The Clash didn’t sing about standing still as an option, and it isn’t an option for insights professionals as they confront the reality of the Smartphone Era. One promising solution is to move to mobile tracking, but gradually, working in mobile sample bit by bit and taking measures to align it with a tracker's online data. At first, use mobile to include otherwise “hard to reach” Millennials, Gen Z, Hispanics, African Americans, parents of children 18 and under. 

As time goes by, insights professionals who use trackers will have to reckon with the fact that online, PC-oriented surveys are going the way of the vinyl LPs and singles that Clash fans snapped up back in 1982, when “Should I Stay or Should I Go” was released. But in the interim there are proactive measures that can bridge the gap between the online methodology that generated a tracker’s historical data, and the mobile data that’s crucial to an accurate understanding of consumer sentiment now and going forward.

For a productive conversation about how a mobile-app survey panel and advanced mobile research features can meet your tracking studies’ requirements (along with many other uses), just get in touch by clicking here.

The trustworthiness of online panels is dissolving like pennies in a tub of sulfuric acid, but don’t take our word for it. There’s an active conversation among panel providers themselves about the predicament they’re in. The state of that conversation is reflected in the excerpts below, which can be found online in eBooks and podcasts available at InnovateMR.com.

• “Data quality issues have proliferated throughout the industry, with increased incidences of fraud..."

• “Uniqueness is a major challenge for online panel development, leading to high levels of overlap between panels as sample companies all fish from the same pond.”

• “Online recruitment sources tend to be over-saturated with thirty-something mothers and are underrepresented in key groups including young males, African Americans and Hispanics…"

• “With a smaller pool to draw from, many respondents belong to multiple panels...Their responses…can skew the results of a study, simply due to limited population sample.”

• “Bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, to the point that the data…is nearly indistinguishable from real data. It’s a mess as [fraudsters] increasingly use bots to mimic people and fill out surveys…”

• “[Bots] don’t stand out the way they used to. [In the past] we would be able to see bot activity because it [had] completion time of one minute. Now the scripting can mimic behaviors of a real human.”

• “And [bot creators] know the various checks that companies employ…and so they’re mimicking human behavior in a closer way than they ever have before. So it makes it very difficult…to be able to say without a doubt… that this [respondent] is good and this [respondent] is bad.”

• “Right now it’s a pretty dire situation, we really need to change the focus and fix these things…."

There’s more, but how much angst can a person absorb all at once?

On the brighter side, the prospects for representativeness, panel reliability and engagement, and freedom from fraud have never been better for market research. All you need to do is seize the opportunity presented by the mobile apps that dominate consumers’ smartphone use.

For a productive and strictly upbeat conversation about how advanced mobile-app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, and relieve you of the kinds of worries you’ve just read about, please get in touch by clicking here.

And for a quick, entertaining video overview of mobile research, click here.

Consumer research professionals attending the Insights Association’s Corporate Researchers Conference (CRC) this week in Chicago will have an opportunity to hear two scheduled presentations about mobile research. But to get the full picture on mobile, carve out a few minutes to stop by MFour’s booth.

Mike Gaffney (Chief Revenue Officer), Todd Costello (Senior Solutions Executive), Andreas Hoelting and Pat Brassil (Solutions Executives) will share information attendees almost certainly won’t get anywhere else. For instance:

• There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all mobile research technology and methodology.

• As you explore mobile, it’s important to understand and distinguish between the two major approaches.

One of them, “mobile-optimized” or “mobile compatible” surveys, will be the subject of one of the formal presentations at CRC. The description of the talk, entitled “The World Is Going Mobile: Is Your Brand?” reflects the common belief that smartphones are just another conduit for traditional online surveys. At MFour's booth, you'll hear a different message, about how smartphones are upending market research just as they've upended every other aspect of daily life -- and how harnessing best-practices mobile native research built around a smartphone app will give you data and insights opportunities you've never had before. 

The "World Is Going Mobile" talk promises to cover how “mobile-compatible surveys have improved feasibility, higher data quality and [reach] more diverse respondent audiences. So why are only one in five surveys 100% mobile compatible? There remains, shockingly, a great deal of improvement and transition to be done…”

 “Mobile compatible” surveys, however, ultimately only shoehorn traditional, pre-Smartphone Era online surveys onto smaller mobile screens. In all other ways, they remain tethered to last-generation technologies – notifications via email, which are easily ignored, and maintaining a connection to the internet to take the survey, with the risk that respondents will become frustrated if the load time is more than a few seconds, and will drop the survey entirely if it remains slow or the connection vanishes. 

At the MFour booth you can have the rest of the conversation, an all-angles look at mobile, including clarification and differentiation between the “mobile compatible” and mobile app methodologies.

• Learn that when you talk about consumers’ mobile behavior, you’re really talking about their mobile app behavior – the key proof point being Flurry Analytics’ finding that 92% of time U.S. adults spend on mobile is spent using apps rather than browsers.

• See why it matters crucially that mobile app research takes the survey process offline by loading questionnaires instantly into respondents’ phones. Now you’re meeting mobile consumers in the app zone that’s their sweet spot -- where they really want to be.

Todd wants to have a conversation that includes a little business philosophy about “the necessity of evolving and finding your way to successful transformation. If you’re open to moving forward, we can help by sharing ways to the most efficient and non-intrusive solutions for connecting with mobile consumers.”

One theme you can explore with the MFour team is how mobile-app research amplifies the voice of the consumer – because smartphones and mobile apps are literally the mouthpieces and earpieces we use today to receive and transmit information, opinions and emotions.

Stop by, and you’ll see how mobile multimedia capabilities amplify and deepen what survey respondents can tell you. Through photo capture they can show you exactly what they see in real time as they stroll the store aisles. Ask panelists to make video selfies, and you’ll see and hear them telling you in their own words what they feel about your brands and products, and their shopping experiences.

You’ll also get a quick education about mobile-app geolocation studies – how they bring you the consumer’s voice at just the right time and place, giving you ironclad validation of your respondents’ locations and getting their answers before their recall can decay. It’s the Smartphone Era’s advanced technological answer to traditional in-store, in-person shop-alongs and face-to-face exit interviews conducted with clipboards and pens.

As for those who aren’t going to CRC, you can join us for a productive, one-on-one conversation about mobile app research, whenever it’s convenient. 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!

Now You Can Take The Guesswork Out of Shopper Targeting

Bad News For Online, Part 1: PC Sales Are Plummeting

Bad News For Online, Part 2: News Consumption Has Gone Mobile

And here's a music video for a funky Friday the 13th.

Andreas Sautter has joined MFour as Director of Client Services, bringing more than 25 years of broad tech-sector executive experience to the pivotal job of driving consumer insights projects for major brands and leading market research firms, from initial planning to survey execution to final delivery.

Besides overseeing teams for survey programming & data and survey fielding, he will play a key role in developing and enhancing MFour’s research products, while ensuring the ongoing advancement of internal systems that propel MFour as it delivers on its promise of Quality, Consistency and Innovation in market research.

Andreas comes to MFour having played executive roles in product management and technology development for companies in Europe and the United States. In the advertising technology field he’s served as Director of Digital Operations for YP, Vice President of Operations for SpotRunner, and Director of Product Marketing for NetGravity, a pioneering online ad-delivery company. Andreas also was deeply involved in the early development of online photography services as Director of Products for Ofoto, a photo-finishing and photo-sharing startup that was acquired by Kodak and renamed Kodak Gallery. After the ownership change, Andreas served as Ofoto/Kodak Gallery’s Vice President for European operations.

In an important formative experience, Andreas played a variety of roles at NeXT Computer, Inc., the operating system/software company launched by Steve Jobs after his initial departure from Apple. After an early role as Senior Support Engineer, he worked directly with Jobs as a systems engineer, and became Product Manager for OPENSTEP, an operating system developed by NeXT.

More recently Andreas has been a consultant advising new start-ups from inception and launch to subsequent strategizing for rapid growth.  He holds a degree in Computer Science from HTL Biel/Bienne in Switzerland.

Director of Client Services is a new position, established as MFour grows rapidly as the insights industry realizes that mobile research is the necessary next-step beyond traditional online surveys meant to be taken on desktops and laptops. MFour has built a responsive and engaged all-mobile panel of more than 1.3 million active members. Their satisfaction with the mobile-app survey experience that MFour has defined and steadily advanced since 2011 is the key to fast, accurate and fully representative data and insights decision-makers require in the Smartphone Era.

Welcome aboard, Andreas!