Serve free Slurpees, get 53% more customers.

That was the sweet deal for 7-Eleven in its annual July 11 Slurpee giveaway, in honor of July 11 being 7-11. We were able to quickly quantify this huge spike in nationwide store traffic because we track U.S. consumers’ shopping journeys 24-7 on our Path-2-Purchase™ Platform.

Platform users get location-visit data that’s updated daily, encompassing visits to 12.5 million commercially relevant locations nationwide, including all outlets of the top 1,000 U.S. retailers.

And here’s why it matters, using the 7-Eleven Day giveaway as an example.

• What will happen in the days and weeks following 7-Eleven customers’ big Slurpee binge? Will the surge in traffic be nice and sticky, or will it melt away like a cup of ice in the summer heat? Answers are at your fingertips, because Path-2-Purchase™ is always on, providing an inexhaustible fountain of validated consumer-journey intelligence for everyone.

• Did 7-Eleven’s free Slurpees peel away customers who typically go to a different store for cold drinks, gasoline, and other C-store sundries? You can identify other brands’ frequent visitors and see whether they defected to 7-Eleven on 7-11 to get that free refreshment. And you can keep tracking them as time goes on, to see whether it was a one-day stand, or whether they are now going steady with 7-Eleven.

• What kinds of product giveaways would work for a different C-Store or for a Quick-Serve Restaurant? With Path-2-Purchase™ you can identify and target consumers who visited 7-Eleven on free Slurpee day, and send them a survey. Ask what they thought of 7-Eleven’s giveaway, and what kinds of items they’d go out of their way to get for free at another chain’s stores. 

• Do the same kind of research around any retailer or brand’s major promotion, whether it’s daylong, weeklong, or monthlong.

Marketing and consumer insights professionals who've visited the the MFour blog have seen lots of posts about the new Path-2-Purchase™ Platform. Now you can experience it for yourself. We've debuted a free, interactive Path-2-Purchase™ dashboard, and as you play with it, you'll see it's a dramatic step forward for the art of targeting and tracking consumers across their buying journeys. 

Read the full details here. Or to jump right into your free trial, just click here.

The Path-2-Purchase™ dashboard is a highlight of a new MFour.com website that’s been fully revamped and redesigned for easy access to clear, detailed, transparent content that lays out the state-of-the-art in mobile market research, including MFour's noted location-based survey capabilities powered by proprietary GeoIntensity^® and GeoNotification^® technologies. Please spend a few minutes strolling around the site, which we believe you'll find to be the largest, most useful and substance-filled repository of information about mobile market research and its best-practices you've ever encountered.

Sarah Chung, Jim Timony and Joan Martinez (L-R)

MFour welcomes three new employees who together bring more than 60 years of experience to its Sales and Operations teams.

In Sales, veteran market research executive Jim Timony joins as a Senior Solutions Executive, and Sarah Chung as Solutions Executive. Joan Martinez has joined the Operations team as a Senior Research Consultant.

Jim has been immersed in consumer insights for more than 25 years. At GFK he rose to Vice President of Media and Communications Research, and won an Employee of the Year award. More recently, he was Phoenix Marketing’s Vice President of Converged Technology & Media. He brings extensive experience in designing and overseeing qualitative and quantitative projects, and in guiding clients to new methodologies that provide a clear roadmap for growth. At MFour, Jim will help clients benefit from unprecedented capabilities, including measuring and testing mobile ads’ effectiveness and gaining insights via the new Path-2-Purchase™ Platform. Jim earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Economics from Franklin Pierce College. He’s a golfer and a football fan, and enjoys spending time with his family.

Joan has 20 years of market research experience across a wide range of business categories, which she’ll apply to understanding MFour clients’ goals and guiding them to successful projects, from survey design through analysis and recommendations. Most recently she was Research Director for Alter Agents, Inc. Joan holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from California State University, Los Angeles. She’s an avid golfer, and is especially proud that she was one of two women who qualified for the championship round of the 2016 Southern California Golf Association’s Amateur Net Score tournament. As befits a stats and numbers expert, Joan also has played competitive poker. She says she has been unusually successful in raffles and playing the lottery, which she attributes to having been blessed by Pope John Paul II when he visited her native Guam in 1981.

Sarah brings more than 17 years’ sales experience to MFour, including positions with Salesforce, Ingram Micro, Alteryx and Kimberly Clark. At MFour she will guide clients toward Path-2-Purchase™ solutions that include identifying audiences with behavioral and profiling data housed in Consumer Knowledge Center, coupled with real-time, location-specific surveys. Sarah is an alumnus of California State University, Long Beach, where her focus was business administration. She is a dedicated gastro-tourist, enjoys spectator sports (especially basketball) and likes spending time with her husband and her dog, Louie.

Welcome aboard, Sarah, Jim and Joan!

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