Increasingly, we're seeing online panel providers blame clients for their inability to deliver the quality, representative completes that a study demands. If not for poor survey design, the logic goes, online surveys wouldn't be losing their ability to engage and deliver.  

But new sales figures for personal computers, the devices online studies primarily rely upon, tell a very different story. They show that the fault lies not in researchers’ failure to write effective surveys, but in the fact that consumers are ditching PCs and simply aren’t available to answer when online research calls. Online providers who pretend otherwise seem to have persuaded themselves that they are not riding the wrong horse, but that you, the client, are to blame for not feeding the stumbling beast the right brand of oats.

Here’s the latest bad news for online, PC-driven research:

• The technology research analyst, Gartner, reports that U.S. shipments of PCs fell 5.7% in the second quarter of 2017 compared to Q2 in 2016.

• This follows a 2.4% drop in Q1. Globally, personal computer shipments have now declined in 11 consecutive quarters, which CNet characterized as “the longest slump in the PC industry’s history.”

• Commenting earlier this year on the Q1 sales, Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa told USA Today that “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.”

• According to Gartner’s most recent report, “consistent growth” in the business market is propping up PC sales somewhat, but not nearly enough to make up for consumers’ flight to mobile.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s latest report on how consumers rate their devices is the proverbial other shoe that’s dropping on personal computers. Satisfaction with personal computers fell 1.3 points to 77 on a 100-point scale, according to its latest ACSI E-Business Report. That's one more indication that opting for online research is like betting on a long shot at the race track.

“The problem with PC demand is actually quite simple, and it’s reflected in weak customer satisfaction,”  said Claes Fornell, ACSI’s chairman and founder. “Manufacturers aren’t investing enough in innovation. Compared to smartphones, there is very little advancement in technology to speak of. Functionality is basically the same as it was a few years ago. That’s not a formula for creating satisfied customers, and provides no reason for people to replace their old model with a new one.” According to ASCI, this increasing indifference is reflected in plunging Q2 sales for desktops and laptops:  “the lowest quarterly shipment volume since 2007.”

Are we beating a dead horse when we beat up on online/PC-fed research?  We’ll be happy to stop when the consumer insights profession finally put online out to pasture and seizes the mobile solutions that will make up the loss in representativeness and data quality the industry experiences when it bets on a horse that's past its prime. For a productive conversation on how offline mobile-app research can meet your  projects’ specific needs, just get in touch by clicking here.

Smartphones put the world at shoppers’ fingertips. And understanding how those fingertips are tapping on mobile apps is a new goldmine for insights.

For example, if your research project focuses on finance, knowing who’s got a banking app lets you make a beeline to the exact banking customers you need to know. The same goes for finding survey respondents for studies of quick-serve restaurants. In that case, whoever has an app for a QSR brand is someone worth knowing. What if you need to talk to sports fans about buying team jerseys, or about what they like to eat and drink at viewing parties? Getting in touch with users of league apps or sports channel apps would be a great place to start.

Mobile app-tracking makes it all possible by giving you a fast, efficient, cost-effective and unerring way to target survey panelists. In one project, a researcher wanted to know how willing Panera Bread customers would be to pay $3 for delivery service. Here are some information points to show what app tracking meant for that study, and other potential uses.

• Mobile App Tracking efficiency achieved a 100% incidence rate for targeting Panera app users – not surprising, since targeting respondents by the known apps currently on their phones is a sure thing.

• App tracking removed the problem of relying solely on respondents’ stated assurances that they buy from Panera. Having the app is a strong validation point.

• Target consumers who use more than one app in a category – for example, both Panera and Subway, or Walmart and Target, for competitive insights and a broader understanding of how these consumers decide which app to use when confronted with a particular shopping objective.

• Target an app’s users to learn about satisfaction with the app itself, and how well it’s driving revenues. Does the app need to be more user-friendly?

• Find exactly who you need to talk to in satisfaction studies – products, brands, and shopping experiences.

• Study non-buyers by starting with consumers who have a competitor's app, but not yours.

• Get broad insights into a consumer segment: for example, to understand readers, target panelists who have the Kindle app. To understand travelers, home in on people who have hotel or car rental apps.

While Mobile App Tracking works directly on Android devices, panelists with iOS devices can also be tracked down by their apps with an uncomplicated alternate targeting approach. There’s a lot more to say about mobile app tracking, given its immense versatility as a door-opener for sophisticated research. To have that forward-looking conversation as it relates to your specific projects, just get in touch by clicking here.

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

If market research can’t keep up with consumer preferences and behaviors, what industry can? Sadly, this is no longer a rhetorical question.

The answer should be, “of course market researchers are the first to know where consumers are right now, and where they’re heading.” But the industry’s unaccountable failure to embrace mobile research effectively calls into question its ability to keep up. And a new report on Americans’ mobile behavior from Pew Research Center shows that the huge gulf in understanding between U.S. consumers and skeptics in the market research industry is growing at an alarming rate. 

The Pew report focuses on which devices Americans use to access news – the consumer behavior that in its very nature is perhaps most akin to market research’s own mission, which is to inform. The findings, based on a survey of 4,151 respondents conducted in March, make one wonder what’s keeping any industry from embracing mobile without hesitation.

• “Use of mobile devices for news continues to grow,” Pew reports, with 85% of U.S. adults getting news on mobile at least some of the time – up from 72% just a year ago.

• Among young Americans and those in early middle age, mobile news access is virtually at the saturation point: 94% for those 18 to 29, and 94% as well for the 30 to 49 age group.

• Mobile news consumption soared among older demographics during the past year, from 63% to 79% among 50- to 64-year-olds and from 43% to 67% for those 65 and older.

• 85% of Americans said they alternate between using mobile devices and desktops for news. Among those who use both, 65% said they prefer mobile, up from 56% a year earlier.

• For 18- to 29-year-olds who get news on both mobile and desktop, 77% prefer smartphones over PCs.

News publishers have gone all-in on mobile, for obvious reasons. Is there any doubt that the same reasons apply to consumer research? 

Apparently there still are doubts among insights professionals who continue to see online surveys as the most useful way to find and understand consumers whose every other communications preference favors mobile. Due diligence would seem to suggest the need for some research on the part of panel and research technology buyers into whether there's been a shift in the communications atmosphere. You could start by assessing your own behavior when it comes to getting the news.

For a productive conversation about how advanced mobile-app research can meet your projects’ specific needs, click here. And for a quick, entertaining video introduction to mobile, just click 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 You'll Reach 57.5 Million Hispanics

Know the Score: Mobile Apps 92%, Online, 8%

Let Consumers' Mobile Apps Tell You Who They Are

And here's a Friday Tom Petty tune you need to know.

How could car manufacturers and dealers persuade rideshare passengers who don’t own a car to start shopping for their own set of wheels?

Should a hotel chain that’s trying to boost its market share invest in top-to-bottom remodeling, with an emphasis on workout rooms and other amenities? Or would price-cutting be the best path to increased revenue?

Is a big bank’s app giving its users the ease and functionality they want? Do they still care about in-person banking at a physical branch? Do attitudes vary among different regions? Taken together, do the answers suggest closing more branches – and, if so, which ones?

There’s clearly a lot riding on the answers to these questions, and businesses count on insights professionals to help guide them by obtaining reliable and accurate consumer data.

The business problems above have something in common: before making a decision, it would be extremely valuable to interview a natural, representative cross-section of the company’s regular customers -- or a competitor's customers. Mobile App Tracking is a solution developed specifically to identify and reach out to consumers according to the apps they use.

The consumers and customers being tracked are members of a mobile panel who participate in research via a mobile survey app. Besides providing detailed demographic information when they join the panel to enable accurate targeting, panelists agree to allow some of their phones’ functions to be passively tracked, including app use.  (Currently, Mobile App Tracking is enabled for Android phones but not for Apple iPhones). 

In the first use case above – the rideshare passengers who don’t own cars – auto dealers and auto manufacturers could target people who have the Lyft and/or Uber apps and ask them all about why they haven’t bought a car, how satisfied they are with doing without, whether they pay attention to car commercials, and any number of other relevant questions aimed at giving the research client a deeper understanding of a quickly-changing personal transportation landscape.

Meanwhile, Lyft and Uber could query their own riders about brand and service satisfaction, and do some opposition research by targeting their rival’s app users. The same dynamic would apply in the hospitality and travel industries, and for the financial institutions needing to know how to fine-tune their decision-making in the face of changing technology and changing consumer preferences related to in-person versus online banking.

Think of the mobile app as the equivalent of the phone number in the days before telephone surveys lost their mojo amid falling response rates (Pew Research Center reports that its own phone surveys now get response rates of about 10%). Or think of approaching known app users as an update of the traditional clipboard and pencil survey conducted on the sidewalk outside a store. Whatever analogy you want to draw with legacy research, Mobile App Tracking puts you in direct touch with validated brand-interested consumers who can tell you a lot about the strengths and limits of their loyalty.

For a productive conversation about how Mobile App Tracking might be a solution to some of your own specific research needs, just click here.

By now the idea that consumer insights professionals need to get mobile research right probably has sunk in.

 But for that knowledge to blossom into effective projects, it’s important to dig one layer deeper and understand you can’t get mobile right if you’re not conducting it through a state-of-the-art mobile survey app. That’s because consumers aren’t simply on mobile. They’re on mobile apps, to an extent that eclipses the other method by which smartphone users can take surveys – using their phones' browsers to connect to the internet. Key data points on app use versus browser use come from a study by Flurry Analytics:

• The average U.S. consumer is spending five hours a day using a smartphone.

• Of that time, 4 hours and 36 minutes (92%) are spent using apps; the other 24 minutes (8%) belong to content accessed in a mobile browser.

It's clear that consumer surveys and passive data acquisition will increasingly be conducted with mobile apps. But mobile apps are not commodities – least of all mobile research apps. Developing research-specific capabilities and ensuring the app's smooth functionality for clients and panelists alike is an ongoing, full-time task. It requires a team effort by software developers, quality assurance analysts, client service liaisons and survey programming and fielding experts, all of whom have the needed experience and expertise to make the app and the complex research apparatus it houses translate into seamless and effective consumer insights projects. So when you make your move to app-based research, make sure to learn about the people who stand behind the app, because it's the team as a whole that will make all the difference.

An illustration from another industry is worth noting -- as outlined in a recent MediaPost commentary about a new app rolled out by a beverage retailer.

“The … app at this early stage feels like a “me-too” execution but lacks the vision for where it’s going. I feel like a marketing team checked off the box to get the app out the door, but didn’t explain the longer-term vision to the customer. It almost feels like they did a soft launch, hoping not to come out of the box with installs blazing so they could gauge customer interest."

"Mobile is a way of life, one that’s not going away anytime soon," the article continues.  "I’d think … [the company] should be looking at this as an all-in strategy, trying to uncover ways to exceed customer expectations and surpass its largest competitor.”

The takeaway for insights professionals is that when a sample or survey technology provider tells you “we’ve got mobile" or even "we've got a mobile app,” that's merely a conversation-starter, a minimum acceptable ante for getting into the mobile research game. Apps must be finely-tuned to their tasks, especially one as complex as carrying out mobile surveys. Here are some points to keep in mind:

• Make sure the app is not a new arrival created by a company with little or no track record of developing survey apps.

• Be wary of providers who focus on technology but have little or no knowledge of the objectives of market research, and even less about the specifics of how panelists are recruited and how surveys are designed, fielded and reported. 

• Be sure to give close consideration to the most proven and well-established app-based research platform. Surveys on the Go® from MFour debuted in 2011, just four years after the debut of the first iPhone and three years after Android smartphones came on the scene, cementing this change in how we all live. 

• Get specific answers about what the research app provider is doing to ensure that it can gather a quality research panel around that app. That's not possible without fair cash compensation for taking surveys, nor can a panel be recruited and kept well-engaged without providing its members with excellent user service. The SOTG app has more than 1.3 million active U.S. users, virtually all of whom discovered it by word of mouth.

• Download the app, join the panel, and see for yourself whether the surveys measure up to your expectations for engagement and smooth functionality.

• Get opinions from tens of thousands of app users by checking their publicly-available ratings and comments stating their satisfaction with the survey app's performance. 

• As of the start of this month, 59,344 users had posted ratings or reviews of Surveys on the Go® in the Apple and Google app stores from 2011 to the present. 69.5% had given SOTG the top rating of 5 stars; an additional 17.3% gave it a 4-star rating.

• The app's overall score continued to stand at 4.5, an approval level it has enjoyed for years.

For a productive, forward-looking conversation about how app-based mobile research can address your specific needs, click here. To download Surveys on the Go® and take it for a spin, click here. And for an entertaining video introduction to mobile app research, just click here. 

“Hard to reach” may be the three most dangerous words in the consumer research vocabulary, because a consumer who can’t be reached is a consumer who can’t be understood. Marketing decision-makers deserve real, on-the-money insights drawn from reliable data obtained from actual consumers. But when outdated online sampling methods fail to represent Hispanics, African Americans and young adults, marketers have no choice but to resort to hunches and questionable inferences.

Accepting the myth that Hispanics and other groups are “hard to reach” isn’t just dangerous, but sad, because in today’s interconnected mobile world, no important consumer demographic should be hard to reach. If you’re having a hard time obtaining survey data and passive behavioral data from Hispanics, Millennials, African-American and Gen Z, it’s because online research is badly misaligned with today's mobile-centric lifestyles.

A recent report from Pew Research Center clarifies why insights professionals wedded to online methodology have come to expect low participation from the so-called "hard to reach groups."

• Only 60% of Hispanics and 66% of African-American adults (compared to 83% of whites) own a desktop or a laptop computer, the dominant devices for taking online surveys. It stacks the odds decisively against reaching a representative sample of an increasingly diverse U.S. population. Your chances grow dimmer still when you need to break out quotas such as age range, income and geography. The more granular your needs for understanding "hard to reach" consumers, the more compromised your data quality will be -- until you get mobile right.

• Conversely, the reachability gap all but disappears when you reach out to consumers on their phones. Phone ownership is 77% for whites, 75% for Hispanics and 72% for African-Americans, and more than 90% for Millennials. Mobile survey methodology puts all these groups in reach.

• The average American adult spends 92% of time on smartphones using an app, according to Flurry Analytics, rather than connecting to the internet with a browser -- the method required for "mobile optimized" surveys. In-app surveys align with the 92%, not the 8%.

The U.S. Census Bureau has reported on demographic trends that underscore how important it is to remove barriers to a full understanding of ethnic consumers.

• The Hispanic American population grew 2% in 2016, reaching 57.5 million.

• The African American population grew 1.2%, to 46.8 million.

• The non-Hispanic white population grew by an infinitesimal fraction – a 5,000-person increase from a base of 198 million.

As we consider how market research must change to provide a reliable representation of U.S. consumers, these data points speak for themselves. For a forward-looking conversation about how advanced mobile-app research can meet your immediate research needs and position you for the future, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

For an illuminating video case study on how Anheuser-Busch used mobile-app geolocation studies to interview Hispanic beer shoppers just after they’d left a convenience store, just click here. And for a quick, entertaining video overview of mobile research, click here.

What does hot-shot high school basketball player LaMelo Ball have to do with market research?

The Los Angeles area star scored 92 points in a game last season, the first time a high school baller had hit the 90-point mark since 2005. Basketball fans are waiting to see whether LaMelo will eventually outshine his older brother, Los Angeles Laker Lonzo Ball, who was the second player picked in the most recent NBA draft.

Ninety-two is also a magic number for marketers and insights professionals to remember. Flurry Analytics’ latest study of U.S. telecommunications usage found that the average American spends five hours a day using a mobile device – and that 92% of that usage takes place inside a mobile app, eclipsing the 8% of time spent accessing and creating content with a mobile browser. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center has reported that as of 2016, 92% of Americans ages 18 to 29 owned smartphones.

If you're not persuaded by magical thinking and prefer to stick to commonsense logic, here are some fundamental truths to consider when putting together your playbook for obtaining the most representative and useful consumer insights: 

• Consumer research needs to reach representative numbers and kinds of consumers.

• Consumers have flocked to mobile (desktops and laptops get far less usage time than mobile). It's where they literally represent themselves in the information universe, by downloading, uploading and sharing content. 

• Recent GreenBook Research Industry Trends Reports (GRIT) have voiced the urgent need for market research to get mobile surveys right.

• Mobile-app research is the way to achieve representation and engagement, because mobile apps are where average U.S. consumers can be found 4 hours and 36 minutes a day. As opposed to “mobile optimized” research (which actually should be called “mobile browser” research), which is trying to dig for insights in the sparsely inhabited online mobile zone where the average person spends just 24 minutes a day.

And here are a couple of bonus data points for basketball buffs:

• Just two college basketball players over the past 35 seasons have made 92% of their free throws over the course of their NCAA careers – Blake Ahearn of Missouri State and Derek Raivio of Gonzaga, who both played from 2004 to 2007. Ahearn shot 94.57% from the line, and Raivio hit 92.7%

• No NBA player has achieved a career free-throw average as high as 92%; only 21 players have ever made 92% or more of their free throws in a single season. Steve Nash has come the closest over the course of an entire career, averaging 90.43%. Stephen Curry, at 90.1%, is the only active player who’s above the 90% mark for career free-throw accuracy.

That’s our play by play for today. To wrap it up, the score is 92% to 8% in favor of Mobile App Research with a dedicated panel of app-using respondents. Which method  do you want to bet your next project on? For a productive conversation about mobile-app research, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

For an entertaining video overview of mobile research, just click here. And to see how Anheuser-Busch used mobile geolocation studies to help launch a new brand, click 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!

Learn How Anheuser-Busch Runs Mobile Product-Launch Studies

How All-Mobile Methodology Boosts Path 2 Purchase Insights

Did You Get The Most Out Of P2PXpo? Yes, If You Met These Guys.

And here's a Friday tune to ease you into Autumn.

Now that this year’s Path to Purchase Expo (P2PX) is a wrap, we’d like to add one more takeaway for attendees and non-attendees alike. Here’s a short guide to using mobile research to understand the path to purchase from start to finish and beyond.

• First, find a representative panel of consumers whose paths to purchase you intend to trace. To get in touch with today’s consumers, you have to make their phones your touchpoint. A well-designed mobile research app can put you in comfortable and reliable contact with the people whose comings and goings and opinions and emotions and experiences you need to understand.

• Test the ads you’re relying on to lead consumers down the path. Unique mobile solutions let advertisers test social media messaging in consumers’ natural newsfeeds on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. You know it’s a test, but your targeted consumers don’t, because they’ll experience the test ads no differently from the rest of the content they’re receiving. Social Ad Testing doesn't just measure clicks. It gives you deeper insights by letting you survey the test recipients. Clicks are worth counting, but answers about what's driving that interest can give you insights into your ad's potential that are based on more than inferences. If the test feedback is strong, you can launch the campaign with confidence that it will raise awareness, favorable perceptions, interest and intent to buy.

• Just how effective is your ad campaign? Advertising needs measurement. The key here is the unique ID each smartphone has. You can match mobile consumers' smartphone IDs and demographic profiles against ad-delivery codes to see whether the ads are really reaching your target consumers. Then you can double back and survey these verified ad recipients to see whether a mobile ad lifted awareness and intent to shop and buy.

• Mobile consumers go places with their phones – and that’s where geolocation research comes in. Find panelists who’ve passed in view of an out of home sign such as a billboard or a bus shelter, and survey them immediately to measure the OOH ad’s effectiveness. Find shoppers while they’re in the act – locating them in-the-moment in the exact stores you’re interested in. It’s the old in-person research shop-along or exit survey – brought into the present by harnessing smartphone capabilities. You survey them about products of interest and any facet of their shopping experience -- before time passes and compromises their recall and, consequently, your data.

• The path to purchase is also the path to non-purchase: find and survey people who shopped but didn’t buy. Or who did buy – but it was your competitor’s product instead of your own.

• Go beyond the point of purchase. Don’t just say “hooray” because shoppers bought your product. Follow them home and send them a mobile product-satisfaction survey. Find out whether they’re eager to get back on the path to purchase your product again – or what you should consider changing if the verdict isn’t good.

There’s an old blessing that goes, “may the road rise with you.” Mobile research puts you on the road to reaching the right consumers at the right moment and in the right way. For a productive conversation on how mobile solutions can meet your specific research needs, just get in touch at solutions@mfour.com.

For an entertaining video overview of mobile research, just click here. And to see how Anheuser-Busch used mobile geolocation studies to help launch a new brand, click here.