History buffs will remember the Maginot Line.

It was a string of imposing fortifications the French built along their border with Germany during the 1930s. German forces had poured into France during World War I, and it took four years of brutal fighting on French soil to defeat them. The Maginot Line was built to ensure that this would never happen again.

What the French high command failed to anticipate was an end run executed at unprecedented speed with unprecedented military technology. Blitzing German forces flanked the Maginot Line in the early days of World War II, and France fell in a matter of weeks.

Now market research has its own Maginot Line. Like the one in France, it’s an impressive and righteously intended piece of defensive architecture that will have little effect because it has been built to fight the last war.

This new line of defense is a recently-announced system designed to protect researchers from buying bad internet sample. It aims to address an acknowledged crisis in MR – intensifying gaps in the quality, reliability and demographic reach of online panels. The program has a laudable goal -- to test and vet the panels that participating suppliers provide to the project's sponsor, a company that aggregates and brokers panels for research projects. It aims to help buyers become better-informed and more secure about what they’re getting, because they’ll be able to check the panel-quality ratings and rankings the system generates. It’s also designed to give suppliers a strong incentive to address any issues that are holding down their panels’ scores.

The concept makes sense. If it works as intended, it undeniably will be very helpful – in fighting the last war.

As recently as the late 2000s, such a quality-rating program for online panels would have mattered a great deal. At that point, personal computers still ruled. But that’s no longer the case. It’s the smartphone that now permeates our lives – and by all reckoning its domination will continue, in what we can confidently call the Smartphone Era.

People want to do their business and experience their pleasures on mobile. They want to be informed and entertained on mobile. They want to relate to friends and family on mobile. They want to be on mobile.

You can verify this just by looking around. But if you need harder evidence than what your eyes tell you, the Pew Research Center provides the numbers: 72% of American adults owned smartphones as of early this year – including 86% ages 18 to 29 and 83% ages 30 to 49. These are the prolific consumers, present and future, who are crucial for researchers to reach.

The process that undergirds online surveys is a throwback to ancient times – well, to a time before 2007, when the iPhone debuted. Online research calls for panelists to be notified by email, click on a link, and take a survey that’s housed on a website. It’s not a process that suits a smartphone-using public. Citizens of the smartphone era vastly prefer apps to web connections that can be fragile and data-consuming. Properly-designed survey apps will cache content, allowing respondents to answer questions offline. Mobile panelists receive push notifications -- the friendly doorbell ring of the smartphone era – rather than emails, which often are seen as annoyances to be ignored or quickly skimmed through and tossed out.

Again, the numbers bear this out: comScore’s report, “U.S. Cross Platform Future in Focus – 2016,” found that by the end of 2015, mobile apps accounted for 56% of Americans’ engagement with digital media, measured by time spent on all devices combined. Factoring in web connections as well as apps, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Americans’ time with digital media.

Given these facts, the stark logic in market research comes down to this:

• The bedrock basis of this industry is its ability to communicate with a representative slice of the public. 
• Today’s public overwhelmingly presents itself on smartphones and occupies itself with smartphones.
• Therefore: Is there any reason to believe that taking surveys is the one form of communication and information exchange that people would rather not conduct on mobile?

It’s a mistake, however, to make a simple blanket statement that surveys targeted to mobile devices will solve the panel crisis. The key is using an advanced mobile approach rather than one that's been quickly slapped together in order to catch up.

It takes special software engineering and survey-design work to make questionnaires display and function well on smartphones. The look must be clean, the content instantly understandable. The survey can’t slow the respondent down or let boredom seep in. It must be the kind of glitch-free experience that smartphone users expect and demand from everything that’s on their devices.

It almost goes without saying that, given the public’s obvious preferences, a quality mobile survey experience will attract and engage panelists in numbers that now elude online research.

But can anything comparable to the quality checking that’s now being advocated for online surveys be duplicated for mobile research?

It’s already being done, in the most natural way: mobile survey apps come with a built-in, completely public quality control system. They’re downloaded from the App Store (for iOS users) and Google Play (for Android). These are among the most prominent storefronts on the digital town square, and each provides a public bulletin board where people who use an app are free to comment on it and rate their experiences for all to see. To get a good idea of a survey app’s functionality and its panel’s satisfaction and engagement, researchers need only do what they’re best at – listen to a slice of the public.

We’re not in a position to evaluate how well the new project to rate online panel quality will fulfill its aim. All we can say is that it’s aiming at the wrong target. It’s asking market research to shoot arrows into the past, where even a bullseye won’t help it succeed in the present, or position it to prosper in the future.

The French put a lot of thought, effort and expense into the Maginot Line. It may have been the strongest bulwark the world has ever known. And it would have worked perfectly – if only time and technology had stood still.

What’s more annoying than having to pay for stuff you don’t want and don’t need?

• Cable channels you don’t watch

• Ticket “convenience charges” that have nothing to do with convenience

• MR interviews that terminate but still cost you money

• Suspect data from unreliable respondents

MFour can’t help you with the cable company or the ticket sellers, but it’s our business to make sure you get full value for your research dollar – and that a research rip-off never happens.

• We don’t charge for terminated interviews. When you say you need 200 successfully completed, quality interviews, we make sure that’s exactly what you get.

• You come to us for clean data, and clean data is all you pay for. We examine every interview, toss out the bad, and only charge for answers that generate insights.

At MFour, the job isn’t just building better research. It’s building up an industry by setting a better standard.

Sabrina Santos has joined MFour’s team as Administrative Assistant, with a wide range of responsibilities supporting senior management and staff. Sabrina has a degree in marketing management from Biola University and was previously an assistant manager and senior buyer for Crossroads Trading Co., a fashion retailer and exchange. Welcome aboard, Sabrina!

We have to admit it – this blog sometimes gets a little, shall we say, impatient, because many market researchers seem to be tiptoeing instead of sprinting into the smartphone era.

We’ve been the leading pioneer and evangelist for all-mobile research since 2011, and we have to confess that we thought the whole MR world would have converted by now from online to mobile surveys.

But recent reports from the front lines in other industries remind us that it’s never easy for industries to change course. In each case, an industry not only has all the evidence it needs, but has in fact  accepted the reality that smartphones’ rapid, revolutionary and by all indications lasting ascendancy has brought its business to a tipping point. But human nature makes it hard to make a big change, even when our heads tell us we must – and each of these industries has been slow to act on what it knows.

Now it’s dawning on all business sectors that the time for deliberating over how to confront the mobile age is running out. Better adopt a good mobile plan and act, because the world is moving too fast for laggards to catch up.

With that in mind, here are current snapshots of three hugely important, bedrock industries that face the same imperative that confronts market research: the need to transform in order to succeed the smartphone era.

Legacy News Media

Publishers such as the New York Times and Tribune Publishing, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, have known for a decade or more that print subscriptions and advertising were trending down, with no reason to expect a reversal. “Digital first” became a watchword – but only now are they acting upon that realization with the utmost urgency. Tribune recently changed its name to tronc, which stands for “Tribune online content” – signaling that it’s now dead serious about putting the digital horse before the print cart. The New York Times is going through a major restructuring, including significant staff cuts, as it pushes hard to “build a more digitally focused newsroom and to reach [a] stated goal of doubling digital revenue by the year 2020,” as company leaders put it to the staff in a memo. For “digital,” use “mobile,” because that’s where most digital news traffic comes from.

Banking

Business Insider reports on findings from its recent survey of Millennials about their banking preferences. The findings spell trouble for that cornerstone of American commerce and culture, the bank branch, because Millennials hold the future of banking in their hands – literally. The study of 1,500 Millennials who have bank accounts found that, for them, “the shift toward mobile banking apps is particularly pronounced…they are walking into their banks’ traditional bricks-and-mortar branches less than ever before.”

The report, titled “The Digital Disruption of Retail Banking,” predicts that bank branches will become obsolete and that “banks that don’t act fast are going to lose relationships with customers” as they turn to outside digital banking services.

“The smartphone will become the foundational banking channel. As the primary computing device, the smartphone has the potential to know much more about banks’ customers….The smartphone goes everywhere the user goes, has the ability to collect user data, and is already used for making purchases. Therefore, the banks that will endure will be those that offer banking services optimized for smartphones.”

Thanks, BI, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Marketing

MediaPost’s MobileInsider blog cites a study by Adobe showing that 28% of e-commerce revenues this year come from mobile transactions – a near-doubling in just two years. Despite this obvious accretion of a mobile snowball into a mobile avalanche, MediaPost’s Gavin O’Malley reports, “just one in five companies around the globe have a defined mobile strategy that goes back at least 12 months….That’s despite the fact that 63% of brands believe the quality of their mobile experience is more important than that on desktop….[and] despite the fact that the number of brands that see themselves as `mobile first’ has increased 200% since 2014!”

What’s happening with marketing sounds a lot like what’s happening with its crucial partner, market research.

Market Research

To repeat: Yes, we do get impatient at times (well, a lot, actually) that the inevitable transition from increasingly outdated and ineffective online surveys to all-mobile research isn’t moving as quickly as we’d expected when we began pioneering all-mobile in 2011. But we don’t want late adopters of mobile research to feel bad, because as these examples from news media, banking and marketing show, you are hardly alone. But, as these other industries are realizing, the deadline for action is coming on fast. The consequences of not acting are severe, but the opportunities for those who can and do act are substantial.

We’ll give the last word on this to the late, great David Bowie. Click and enjoy one of his signature songs, “Changes.”

Blake Skorich has joined MFour as a Solutions Development Representative, the newest hire in the company’s ongoing expansion.

Blake augments the team that helps current and prospective clients understand how MFour’s survey technology combined with its all-mobile panel will bring them the data and insights they need. He arrives after working in digital marketing and operations for shoe merchandiser Deckers Brands. Blake has a bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Northern Arizona University. Welcome aboard!

The path to purchase increasingly begins on a smartphone. Shouldn’t the path to consumer insights start there as well?

Fresh evidence about the smartphone’s rising importance to shoppers comes from Google, which recently analyzed searches related to back-to-school shopping. As reported by MediaPost’s SearchMarketing Daily, Google found that shoppers carried out 60% of those searches on mobile devices during July – up 35% from July, 2015.

What’s more, 85% of views for back-to-school shopping videos posted by retailers such as Target took place on mobile devices.

At stake: $75.8 billion in expected back-to-school buying.

Let’s briefly follow the logical path this suggests for market research.

1. Market research is concerned with discovering what consumers think, feel and do.

2. Therefore it behooves research professionals to approach consumers where they most frequently do this thinking, feeling and doing.

3. Consumers increasingly are doing their primary thinking, feeling and doing while looking at their smartphone screens.

4. Therefore – well, the conclusion is inescapable, don’t you think?

The only question remaining is how best to accomplish mobile research.

What’s crucial to know is that it is not a commodity. One mobile approach is not as good as the next. So researchers need to do some shopping of their own.

Take a hint from those millions of back-to-school shoppers. Google “mobile research.” Skip the paid, “sponsored” links at the top, look at the natural search results, and see what you find.

Bloomberg reports that television viewing patterns for the Rio Olympics defied a particularly golden nugget of conventional wisdom: the supposed invulnerability of major live television sporting events as magnets for viewers.

It turns out that the old wisdom doesn’t apply to Millennials. The group that marketers need the most is the one most resistant to the pull of live televised events. Millennials, it turns out, would rather control when, where and how they watch, instead of being called to attention on someone else’s schedule.

“NBC’s $12 Billion Olympics Bet Stumbles, Thanks to Millennials,” is Bloomberg’s headline, and the story by Gerry Smith gives the particulars: TV viewing for the Rio Olympics was down 17% overall from the 2012 London games, and 25% among the 18-49 Millennial/Gen X audience.

Like other legacy media who’ve realized they must fully embrace sharing their content online, NBC compensated by streaming the Olympics as well, mainly in hopes of capturing younger eyes. Streaming viewers totaled between 225,000 and 500,000 per night, according to the New York Times. 

Perhaps the most grabbing fact for market researchers in the Bloomberg article is this: “NBC charged up to 50 percent higher rates for internet ads than for TV because the web audience trends younger and marketers are eager to reach millennials.”

Millennials also are at a premium in market research. The balance of buying power is shifting to the generation that’s now 16 to 35 and numbers more than 75 million in the U.S., passing the previously most-numerous Baby Boomers.  If researchers can’t reach Millennials…well, let’s just say that’s not an appealing scenario.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a reliable and effective conduit for eliciting opinions and preferences from Millennials, then you’re a frontrunner in the MR race. Millennials' preferences as consumers shape up as being more complex than their elders', so businesses will need to adapt nimbly to attract and satisfy them. That will take some doing -- and some very high quality research data. 

MFour’s value proposition is that the all-mobile research technology and smartphone-specific panel it has developed is the conduit that today’s market researchers need – not just to reach Millennials, but to access  other demographic groups who are considered hard to reach by traditional online-survey methods -- including Hispanics and African Americans.

Vision, focus and experience get results, and MFour got a big jump in turning its mobile vision into mobile know-how. Our Surveys on the Go® app debuted in 2011 -- the earliest days for smartphone surveys -- and began  attracting a panel that now numbers more than a million active members who have the app and respond solely on their mobile devices. Millennials are fully present, accounted for – and are giving MFour's clients a crucial account of their views and habits as consumers and shoppers.

Again -- NBC’s Olympics advertisers were willing to pay premiums of up to 50% on the promise of reaching more Millennials, according to the Bloomberg report. How much is it worth to you to reach them? And how are  you going to do it?

For answers, browse this blog and website further, or contact us and we’ll be happy to fill you in.

Everyone who does valuable work deserves to get paid.

A recent New York Times report about how key employees of hot tech startups are getting restless about whether their stock incentives ever will pay off is a clear example of that dynamic.

Although there’s a chasm between tech geniuses and most market research panelists, the payment issue facing Silicon Valley has echoes and lessons for MR, an industry that relies on authentic responses from thoughtful, honest respondents.

The young tech companies facing the employee stock compensation issue are often highly-valued because their perceived prospects for future success attract large infusions of venture capital. But the Times notes that it has been common policy in the tech world to prohibit valued employees from cashing out private shares they’ve been given as rewards and incentives. As long as they stay, those shares will remain worthless; only if the company goes public will they get a chance to sell them while keeping their jobs.  But going public is a big “if.”

 “Frustrated employees are apt to leave if they believe a promised payday in the form of a stock sale isn’t going to happen,” the Times’ Jim Kerstetter reports. “And in an area where employee retention has become a major issue, it’s all too easy for workers to defect to the next, hot start-up.” Consequently, the article reports, some companies are starting to give employees leeway to cash out at least some of their stock without having to leave.

As we said, there’s quite a chasm between the compensation of tech aces in Silicon Valley, and the cash rewards MFour and other market research firms pay their panelists.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t value and pay close heed to our panel members’ wants and needs. “Be Heard. Get Paid.” is the slogan of MFour's Surveys On the Go® app. It's crucial that we live up to the slogan, which is also a promise, by making the “work” of survey-taking interesting and fun.

The numbers indicate that we've kept the bargain. Our panel has grown to more than one million active members, and counting. Between 2,000 and 5,000 new members join each day, strictly by word of mouth as they hear about SOTG from friends or see comments online.

The panel-related number most relevant to market researchers is 4+ out of 5 – the average star rating Surveys on the Go® consistently pulls down at the App Store and Google Play. We invite researchers to check out those comments and ratings – all of them unsolicited.

Nobody’s going to swing their rent or a mortgage payment by participating in Surveys on the Go®, but the payments are nothing to sneeze at. Judging by users’ public comments, we’re fulfilling both ends of the promise to “Be Heard” and “Get Paid.” Taken altogether, they show that, while panelists may join for the payments, they won’t stay unless the app works just the way it’s supposed to.

For researchers, a panel’s value is in its engagement, its quality and its diversity. Reaching the public where it lives – on smartphones that have become all but indispensable to daily living – is the smartest bet researchers can make when it comes to choosing sample for their studies. Among those who are particularly strong smartphone adopters and users are groups that have become hard to reach by other means -- notably Millennials, Hispanics, African Americans and parents of young children.

Millennials, especially, relish technology, but feel personally offended when it gives them a bad experience and wastes their time. There’s a risk – make that a strong likelihood -- that ill-conceived or poorly-designed surveys will turn them off entirely from taking part in consumer research. That’s probably one reason why Millennials perpetually fall in the “hard to reach” category when it comes to finding sufficient numbers of them to fill out survey quotas.

It’s also important to note who gets shut out of a first-class, all-mobile panel: insincere survey takers such as “professional” respondents who lurk online trying to grab multiple opportunities, and speeders who try to game the system by rushing through surveys with minimal thought and effort. Their flimsy input is detected and cleansed from the data we deliver to clients.

In the architecture of MFour’s business, technology and service can be seen as the superstructure of the company we’ve built. The inhabitants include our panelists and clients alike. But an elegant structure will be empty if it doesn’t meet its inhabitants’ needs. Our panel inhabitants need the survey technology to work for them if we’re to keep them happily housed. And keeping that bargain with our survey-takers is fundamental to delivering the quality, on-time data our clients need.

Good research underlies good business decisions, and good respondents are fundamental to good research. We’re proud of the contributions our panelists make because they truly do want to “be heard.” We’re proud to give them the double reward they deserve – an enjoyable, glitch-free survey experience, and well-earned cash payments.

As the great poet John Milton put it, “They also serve who stand and wait.” Our panel may not include many Silicon Valley tech geniuses -- although they’re more than welcome to join. But as our much-appreciated million-plus members wait for the “ca-ching” sound-alert on their smartphones that signals another Surveys on the Go® opportunity is at hand, they’re standing ready to serve market research and the global economy it helps drive.

There’s ISIS vs. modern civilization, and there’s advertising-supported digital content vs. adblocking tools.

The first conflict is a to-the-death fight against religious fanaticism. But the second is crucial as well, because it may well decide the shape of world commerce in the not-at-all-distant future.

Market researchers – and the clients we serve – will likely be devoting lots of brainpower to getting our heads around this one.

Columnist John Motavalli at MediaPost.com’s “Programmatic Insider” advertising/marketing newsletter has an informative take that attempts to frame, in broader demographic and psychographic terms, the battle between Facebook and Adblock Plus, a leader in ad-blocking tools.

He theorizes that a great deal is at stake for Facebook because its users are “overwhelmingly young,” with about 30% of them in the key 25- to 34-year-old demo that advertisers need – with even more intense Facebooking among the youngest Millennials, ages 18 to 24.

These, the columnist posits, are overwhelmingly the same U.S. groups that flocked to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. In  Motavalli’s view, it’s a group that, not unlike its political hero, is not especially friendly toward big corporations and their established, advertising-centric business models:

“Hundreds of millions of Facebook users have no qualms about disrupting Facebook’s revenue stream. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the safest, most legal way to stick it in the eye of corporate America, other than shoplifting.”

In another recent column, Motavalli ponders whether adblockers will disprove the longstanding truism that “information wants to be free.”

It’s always interesting to look to history for context on contemporary developments, and the struggle over content-funding brings to mind the career and pithy sayings of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest literary minds (and content providers) of the pre-digital age.

This formidable 18^th century English poet and critic more or less invented blogging – in leaflet form. Johnson got paid for his independent written musings by introducing a subscription model not unlike what major legacy newspapers and magazines still rely on as they try to figure out how to replace ever-dwindling print revenues with digital advertising income. For them, as for all content providers, adblocking poses a potential existential threat.

If adblocking does triumph, it may be back to the future for online content, with the paid subscription model Johnson pioneered as the only alternative to the publishers will have lost.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Johnson once said. In other words, if there's going to be content, somebody has to pay for it.

Businesses that rely on content-media as a conduit for commercial messaging can’t afford to be blockheaded about the advent of ad-blockers. How will advertisers speak to potential customers, if the public has decided en masse to shut its  eyes, ears, apps and browsers to commercial messaging?

The answer is: we don’t know. But as market researchers, we may soon find ourselves playing a part in this battle, called upon to deliver insights into the kinds of advertising consumers will or won’t accept, and the types of information for which they will or won’t pay.

For the clients who’ll engage us, the stakes will be extremely high.

Katherine DiPlacito has joined MFour's team as a Research Associate in the Operations department. She’ll help guide clients’ projects from conception through completion and data analysis.

Her hiring marks Katherine's return to Irvine, CA, where she went to high school and where MFour is based. In between she went to college in northern California, then launched her career in market research and marketing with jobs in Boston and New York City.

Katherine most recently had been a research analyst in the mobile department of Phoenix Marketing International in Boston, serving a variety of business clients. Previously she had worked as a marketing associate for Red Rooster Group in New York City, which focuses on raising the branding profile of a nonprofit clientele.

Katherine earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in business administration, from Sonoma State University.

Her hiring continues an expansion that’s expected to double MFour’s staffing to more than 100.