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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a statistic consumer insights professionals might consider memorizing: Pew Research Center now reports that 20% of adult Americans rely solely on smartphones for their internet access. That’s up from 13% who reported relying on mobile phones alone in a Pew study in 2015.

Your own data needs to be representative across whatever demographic you’re trying to understand. Which means you need to reach the public where it lives. Just as railroad stations gave way to airports as the main hubs of physical journeys, personal computers are giving way to mobile for consumers' digital journeys. That’s especially true for crucial, traditionally “hard to find” Hispanics, African Americans and young-adult consumers. Reaching out to them on a personal computer for consumer surveys is barking up the wrong device. Data from Pew studies conducted in January, 2018 and in 2015 shows why:

• Hispanics: 35% are now smartphone-only, up from 23% in Pew’s 2015 study.

• Ages 18-29: 28% are smartphone-only, up from 19% in 2015.

• African Americans: 24% are now smartphone-only users, up from 19% in 2015.

• Whites: 14% are smartphone-only in 2018, up from 10% in 2015.

• Age 65 and older: Even among these slower adopters, smartphone-only use is now at 10% of the senior population, up from 7% in 2015.
  

One obvious takeaway is that in order to reach the representative slices of the public that market research requires, it has be done with mobile. But what you need to know is a bit more nuanced than that. We'll tell you why in our next blog post, so stay tuned. In the meantime (or at any time), you can have a personal, one-on-one info session and demo on state-of-the-art mobile research capabilities, simply by clicking here. 

Are you ready to join the wave of consumer insights professionals who are diving deep into mobile research? If the answer is yes, then congratulations on making that transformative decision.

But taking the dive is just the first step. No methodology will work if the execution is poor. With that in mind, here are eight key questions any savvy mobile-insights buyer should ask. And be sure not to settle for anything less than answers that are authoritative, assured and completely specific to the kinds of projects you need to accomplish. 

• Is the mobile research you're selling the same as your online research, only more portable?

• What specific research capabilities does mobile bring to the table?  

• Where's the sample coming from?

• What level of representation and responsiveness can I expect? 

• Is it true that mobile surveys need to be kept extremely short? 

• I've heard the way to go is "mobile optimized." What exactly does that mean? And is that really true?

• There's lots of talk in the insights industry about how important it is to give survey-takers a quality experience. How does your mobile system accomplish that?

• Can you give me some validation about response rates and respondents' satisfaction with your mobile surveys?

You can get the fast, authoritative answers you need to these questions and more by setting up a one-on-one demo that will focus on meeting your projects' specific needs, and how they align with mobile research capabilities powered by proprietary technologies such as GeoIntensity^® and GeoNotification^®, which enable state-of-the art location-based surveys.

We'll talk about tailoring solutions to your needs, whether it's a custom-research project where MFour provides everything from design and programming through analysis, or taking advantage of the fast insights you can get from a proprietary, mobile-only automated research solution such as Path-2-Purchase™ Platform and  MFourDIY^®. Just get in touch by clicking here.

If you’re talking to the wrong consumers, consumer data and consumer insights suffer. A recent GreenBook webinar called “Working Together To Improve Respondent Experience” reminded us of the deeply inadequate state of online consumer panels, and the threat it poses to your ability to do your job and secure your standing in the decision-making process.

Kristopher Sauriol, Senior Director of Global Research Insights for Visa, was one of the participants, and he summed up the problem and what’s at stake in just a few words:

 “Your data is only as good as the people who are taking your survey….[But panel quality] is not always something research agencies  are forthcoming about….you either should ask, or you should look at some other agencies that do consider this a factor.”

We’d take it just a step further. Accessing validated consumers who are fully engaged in sharing what you need to know is not just “a factor.” It’s the factor. Finding them is a matter of reaching them in their preferred environment, via their preferred technology, the mobile app.

MFour’s story, in a nutshell, is that we built the app, 2 million representative U.S. consumers have downloaded it, and these are the consumers who are best situated to give the insights industry “data…as good as the people who are taking your survey.”

Pictured: Path-2-Purchase™ Platform dashboard

Below is a hypothetical customer satisfaction survey for a casual dining restaurant chain. It looks like a lot of standard surveys that are regularly fielded, but in fact the design is woefully outdated. We’ll tell you why, and what you can do about it.

First, take a look and ask yourself which questions you wish you could replace or eliminate, because you know the data will be compromised by recall bias and other issues that beset stated response questionnaires.

Q1: Have you been to [restaurant chain name] in the past 14 days?

Q2: Please give the location of the restaurant, by city and, if possible, the district or street.

Q3: How often do you eat at a [chain name] restaurant?

Q4: Did you eat at any of these other restaurants during the past 14 days? [showing a list of four competing chains]

Q5: How often do you eat at [the competitors’ restaurants]?

Q6 – Q13: [a series of customer satisfaction and net promoter score questions about the respondent’s most recent visit to the client’s restaurant.]

Q14-Q21: [Identical customer satisfaction questions about the most recent visit to a competitor’s restaurant.]

It’s the first five questions that are problematic. The inadequacy of Q1 to Q5 compromises the reliability of the remainder of the survey, because stated answers about visitation over time just aren’t very trustworthy. Do you remember which restaurants you visited over the past two weeks? Do you still have a strong impression and an accurate, specific recall of the experience, including what you ordered and how friendly and efficient your server was? How satisfied or dissatisfied you were – and why?

So how do you avoid compromising your data about consumer experience and consumer satisfaction? Instead of asking problematic questions about who, where, when and how often, businesses can leverage the groundbreaking Path-2-Purchase™ Platform and see at a glance where real, validated consumers have gone, hour by hour, day by day, across 12.5 million U.S. locations, including all locations of the top 1,000 retailers. Here’s some of what Path-2-Purchase™ delivers:

• Archived, comprehensive location and visitation data that lets you identify brand loyalists and brand rejectors before you’ve even started.

• Survey targeting based on locations, visits and detailed, validated profiles of the industry’s largest proprietary, all-mobile consumer panel.

• The ability to field in-store or after-visit surveys that all but eliminate recall bias.

• “Why” answers you can trust because you’ve asked them at the Point-of-Emotion^® where decisions and experiences are vividly in your respondents’ minds.

• Validation by photo capture of purchase receipts or other identifying images.

• Vivid, in-their-own words insights from “video selfies” you can ask respondents to make about a dining or shopping or product-use experience, while it’s happening or just after the event.

In short, Path-2-Purchase™ gives you a big head start without even having to ask “who,” “when,” “where” and “how often.” You can focus confidently on the crucial “why,” knowing you’ll get data from the right respondents, with recall bias neutralized. It’s accurate, efficient, and simply better, because it’s categorically different from stated-answer surveys taken by poorly validated, multi-sourced panelists.

To set up a one-on-one demo about how Path-2-Purchase™ Platform delivers validated consumer insights for everyone, just click here.

Facebook continues to grow incredibly rich – thanks to its big bet on connecting with people who use mobile devices.

Here are the mobile-relevant numbers from Facebook’s latest earnings report, released today. MFour Mobile Research, the leader and pioneer in all-mobile consumer surveys, urges the market research industry to take special note.

•  Facebook had 1.51 billion unique monthly active mobile users during the first three months of 2016. They accounted for 91.5% of the site’s users.
•   Mobile users were up 21% from the first quarter of 2015.
•  Facebook raked in $4.3 billion in mobile advertising. That accounted for 79% of the company’s $5.4 billion in revenue.
• Facebook made a $2 billion profit for the quarter, more than double last year’s take for the first quarter.

The social media giant has come a long way from 2012, when it had virtually no mobile ad revenue.  As the New York Times put it in a recent article, Facebook “was late to realize the importance of mobile phones; for years, its smartphone app was a slow, kludgy mess, and until just a few years ago it had no mobile revenue to speak of…. Facebook now derives the vast majority of its revenue from mobile ads. Its sales are growing at a breathtaking clip.”

Market research also has been “late to realize the importance of mobile phones.”  But as Facebook shows us, it’s better late than never – WAY better.

MFour, based in Irvine, CA., invented all-mobile consumer research in 2011. Its million-member active panel of survey-takers is the largest, most diverse posse you can reach via smartphone for fast, demographically inclusive, high-impact consumer insights. Now MFour is democratizing mobile research with MFourDIY, its new do-it-yourself mobile survey platform. Check out a special introductory offer at mfourdiy.com.

Mobile rules. Mobile earns. Don’t take our word for it, take Mark Zuckerberg’s.

Big welcome to Caitlyn Sorich, MFour's new operations analyst! Caitlyn graduated from Concordia University and has completed her Masters in Psychology. She will be assisting our COO and Director of Operations in running their respective departments. Glad to have you aboard Caitlyn!

From Pong to Pacman, video games have had a place in nearly all of our lives. Since National Video Game Day is tomorrow, we decided to take a look at the preferences and habits of millennial gamers. Check out our survey results!

MFour is happy to announce new hire Andreas Hoelting as project manager. Hoelting graduated from Chapman University and previously worked at AOI Tea Company. As project manager, Hoelting will aide senior staff in delivering quality research to define and dominate the mobile marketplace. Welcome aboard, Andreas!

MFour was recently featured in BusinessWorld's Technology section for our infographic on Millennial gamers for National Video Game Day.

Check us out here!