It's summer, and MFour has the hottest market research app in the United States.

Our signature Surveys on the Go^® app has spent 30 consecutive days ranked in the top 100 among lifestyle apps at both the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

As of Monday, Aug. 8, SOTG ranked 76th in the App Store and 89th in Google Play. The rankings are unmatched by any other survey app in the category. 

The hot streak reflects four essential truths about mobile apps, says Michael Smith, MFour’s Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel.

• Smartphone users will not tolerate less-than-perfect app performance.

• Building an app that works properly requires laser-like focus and dedication over the long haul. Experience counts.

• The penalties for app imperfection are immediate and harsh: public humiliation from thumbs-down comments and bad ratings, followed by the guillotine – a tap on “delete.”

• Competition is fierce, and survey apps that aren’t backed by experienced software engineering teams devoted to advancing app technology, and operations teams who help research clients optimize  mobile survey designs will be exposed and saddled with a reputation for unreliability.

“It all comes down to quality mobile survey designs,” Smith said. “If you have a slow, clunky, thoughtless app experience, you're not going to keep that app very long. MFour has committed the last five years to studying, developing and refining mobile survey design best practices."

MFour recognized early on that smartphones would dominate communications and information exchange. It has pioneered and continually advanced the all-mobile approach that has become the fastest-rising transformative force in market research as the dominance of mobile apps impels researchers to adjust after relying mainly on online surveys and panels.

Five more numbers help round out the story:

• 2011 – the year MFour debuted Surveys on the Go® as the first all-mobile survey app in the U.S.

• 1,000,000 – the milestone of active panelists using Surveys on the Go® that we passed this spring.

• 2,000 to 3,000 -- the number of new panelists joining each day. 

• $0 – what MFour spends on advertising to attract panelists, because the unsolicited, word-of-mouth ratings and comments we get are all it takes.

• 4.5 out of 5 – the average rating users award Surveys on the Go® on the App Store and Google Play.

While we think all these particulars are interesting, you don't have to commit them to memory. All you have to do is check the rankings.

When your project deadline looms and time is of the essence, it’s time to jump on the fastest data vehicle in the entire motor pool of market research – MFour’s all-mobile smartphone survey app and the fully-engaged, million-member panel that’s downloaded it.

Our custom research products and MFourDIY, the only all-mobile do-it-yourself research platform, both can get the job done fast. With MFourDIY, you can build and field your survey in less than an hour.

Here’s how it happens from the moment your survey fields:

1. Push notification – your targeted quotas, including demographically representative complements of hard-to-reach Millennials, Hispanics and African Americans, hear a cash-register “ca-ching” that alerts them to a survey opportunity. No outmoded email notifications needed.
2. Qualified panelists jump on the opportunity. More than one million Americans make up our active panel. They give our Surveys on the Go® app unsolicited raves and high ratings at the App Store and Google Play, and are eager to use it.
3. Native app -- with our native app, your entire survey loads straight into each respondent’s phone. No vulnerable internet connection required.
4. Survey presentation and function are tailored for smartphones, and the native app makes it easy and fast to answer – ideal for quick-hit questionnaires, yet smooth and reliable over LOI of 20 minutes.
5.  Data cleaning -- we do it in-the-moment as it comes in, ensuring the quality you need.
6.  Real time viewing as completes come in on your Project Tracker lets you get an early jump on analysis.
7. Completion rate: 95%.
8.  Completion speed: You get 25% of the completes you need within an hour; 50% within a day; 100% within two days. We told you it’s fast.
9.  Fast reporting. Automatic visualization tools instantly generate charts and graphs of your choice for presenting your data.
10. Deadline met, anxiety relieved. You’ve freed your mind to do your best thinking about actionable possibilities of the insights you’ve gained. You're set to make your best presentation to decision-makers.      

Here's More

MFour's 7-Eleven Speed Test

Love for MFour's Native App 

Teamwork is fundamental to MFour’s company culture because it’s the most enjoyable and productive way to live and work.

It’s also fundamental to the results we generate for market research firms and leading companies and brands that trust us to deliver the data solutions they need, on-time and glitch-free.

Choose MFour, and you’re betting on a team in which different departments mesh and communicate with each other. Our cooperative, mutually supportive internal culture plays a big part in ensuring  you’ll get the data and insights you need to make smart reports and recommendations on the business decisions your bosses or your clients have to get right.

Like a championship pro football team whose offense, defense and kicking game all step up to complement each other, our Solutions executives, Operations staff and Labs & Engineering experts stay on our games to make each project score.

These days, the intense pursuit of teamwork is right in front of our eyes. Less than two miles south of our seventh-floor perch, with its panoramic views of a good swath of Irvine and Newport Beach, stretches the campus of the University of California, Irvine. From our windows we can make out the sports complex where the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams are in their first week of pre-season training.

Our team is back after their 20-year detour to St. Louis. But is it really “our team?”

An MFour staff that pulls together to get your questions answered isn’t exactly meshing with a cohesive answer to this one. We fielded a quick office survey and the results are in: when it comes to pro football, we’re a study in division and disunity, although we’d prefer to call it “diversity.” Football-wise, we have, shall we say, a marketplace of opinions.

Here, the 49ers, Raiders and Cowboys each have multiple fans. The Seahawks, Bears, Steelers, Giants, Cardinals and Texans also get outspoken support. The data suggests that our new neighbors, the Rams, have a way to go to be embraced.

Does this division over the important matter of pro football make MFour less of a team? Should you worry that, come Mondays, we’ll be bickering about what went down on the field on Sunday, instead of focusing on designing and fielding your research?

No way. Lively and friendly disagreement among peers is a social adhesive, not a solvent. Within a culture fed by a mutual goal and founded in mutual respect, banter and repartee aren’t just a lot of fun, but a pathway to cohesion and productivity.

Our little in-house disagreements over sports keep us laughing and joking and talking to each other. And when people start talking to each other, you never know where the conversation might lead.  Banter that begins with “my quarterback’s better than yours” can turn into a discussion of a project and how we can make the data and insights faster, clearer and farther-reaching for the client.

As this song by the terrific 1970s band Badfinger says, “successful conversation will take you very far.” 

And that's what the MFour team is all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2Ag7OwGRs

Get the Only All-Mobile DIY Solution

Tune in Wednesday, August 17, at 11:30 a.m., Pacific, for "MFourDIY: Getting Started," a webinar focusing on the industry's only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey building platform.

Who’s the Facebook of market research? Why, MFour, of course.

No, we don’t have quite the same balance sheet as Mark Zuckerberg’s social media juggernaut, at least not yet. Facebook this week again announced quarterly earnings of “blockbuster” proportions, as New York Times put it, ringing up $6.4 billion in revenues and $2 billion in profit.

But looked at in a certain way, there’s one measure by which MFour outdoes Facebook.

Silicon Valley’s most successful concern is nearly all-in on mobile: Facebook reports that 92% of its 1.71 billion active monthly users check in via mobile devices. MFour is 100% mobile.

OK, so Facebook has approximately 1,700 times as many active users as MFour has active panelists. But the core, proven principle of market research is that a limited number of properly representative respondents taking well-designed surveys will get the job done. And that’s what we’ve been providing since 2011, when we debuted the first and still only all-mobile survey app.

MFour designs and continually advances software that powers the utmost in  functionality and versatility for surveys taken on smartphones and tablets. Along with the tech, we cultivate an engaged, proprietary panel of U.S. respondents who take those surveys solely on their phones and tablets, generating the reliable, demographically representative data our clients need.

More than one million active users have downloaded our native app, Surveys on the Go®.  And unlike online panels, they embody the full spectrum of U.S. consumers, with full complements of the Millennials, African-Americans and Hispanics who elude research that clings to the fading online survey approach.

A smartphone-focused panel plus a state-of-the-art mobile survey experience translates into quality data that’s fast enough to meet tight deadlines and validated to ensure sharp insights leading to effective business decisions.

All joking aside – and you do realize we’ve been joking, right? -- our kinship with Facebook comes from a mutual recognition that the world has gone mobile, and that responding accordingly with smarts, enthusiasm and an innovative spirit is the key to success.

Contact MFour to learn more about how to thrive with us in the all-mobile world.

Email can hurt you.

No, we’re not talking about certain Democratic party luminaries.  

We’re talking about market research, where email is the road to nowhere when it’s used to invite people to take surveys by clicking a link to an online questionnaire.

 Here are four facts documenting the dead-end dysfunctionality of email invitations:

• Users of mobile devices open only about one third of the emails they receive.
• Just one in 10 of those who open an email invitation will click to access the survey.
• Consequently, only 3% of the potential mobile respondents approached by email are engaging with the survey. Even fewer will actually complete it.
• A different study, by a division of IBM, shows the same 3% response or "click through" rate for emails received on all devices, not just mobile.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can avoid driving down the dead-end street of email-enabled online research. Take the all-mobile, native app route instead, where app-based notifications for in-app survey-taking engages panelists at a far higher rate. 

Which leads us to the five other things to know in making the app vs. email comparison -- then acting accordingly.

• More than one million active panelists in the U.S. have MFour’s Surveys on the Go^® app on their smartphones or tablets.
• They get their survey notifications with an in-app push, a capability made possible by a proprietary technology known as GeoNotification®.
• The push arrives with a distinctive “ca-ching” – the sound of a cash register – which signals exactly what this is about: a chance to earn by taking a survey.
• Consequently, 50% of those pushes get the reaction our clients want – engaged respondents embarking on their surveys, which 95% of them go on to complete. 
• Result: App-based mobile notifications are nearly 17 times more effective than email alerts (50% vs. 3%).

Conclusion: We’ll leave it to you.

For more on how mobile app surveys compare to online surveys, check out this essay in GreenBook by Michael Smith, our Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel.

MFour’s App Tracker shows the apps our panelists use, and lets you target surveys based on each Android-using member’s app profile.

These articles in USA Today and Forbes reported data we collected on motives, demographics and experiences of respondents who have the Pokemon Go app.

App Tracking can work for you in looking at lifestyles, behaviors and how a company’s app stacks up against its competitors’.

We’d love to brainstorm ways to make App Tracker generate data and insights you need. Please get in touch to chat and learn more.

The reptile demanded a recount, and the reptile won.

As part of our recent survey of 1,000 Pokemon Go players, we asked respondents to pick their favorite Pokemon creature.

We reported that the winner was Eevee, a cute cross between a rabbit and a fox, with Charmander, a gap-toothed, dinosaur-like fella with a flaming tail, placing second.

On further examination of the data, Charmander edged Eevee by 16 votes, picked by 12.1 percent of the panel to Eevee’s 10.5 percent. Squirtle the two-legged turtle was third, just 4 votes behind Eevee. The famous Pickachu got 9.4 percent for fourth place.

The main issue was the many variant spellings our respondents gave to the write-in question, some of which your faithful blogger failed to tally as votes for Charmander. So any way you want to spell it, Charmander is the champ.