https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CKozKI5Ho

YouTube has become a forum for the important conversation about whether mobile surveys are really the answer to crucial problems facing market research, thanks to Bob Lederer of Research Business Daily Report.

In the daily video report he hosts on YouTube, Lederer pithily framed the issue by laying out the point-counterpoint discussion that has unfolded recently in Quirk’s Marketing Research Review (the segment begins at the video's 1:43 mark).

The debate began, as Lederer noted, with Quirk’s publication of a study of Australian survey-takers that found widespread dissatisfaction with questionnaires fielded to smartphones. The study concluded that traditional online surveys taken on personal computers remained the best approach.

Lederer continued by summarizing an essay that Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s cofounder and CEO, wrote for Quirk’s in response to the findings from Down Under. Chris urged researchers to understand that mobile survey methods are not all created equal. Ones that remain married to online methods by requiring a constant connection to the internet are doomed to the user-unfriendliness that turned off the Australian respondents. Only state-of-the-art mobile capabilities can work.

As Lederer noted, Chris emphasized that the key to great mobile research is embedding surveys instantly into respondents’ phones with the “native app” technology epitomized by MFour’s innovative Surveys on the Go®. Among other things, it eliminates the need for an uninterrupted internet connection -- the Achilles heel of quasi-mobile methods that literally hung up the Australian respondents and left them bemoaning how frustrating it was to take surveys on their smartphones.

Given the right mobile technology, researchers can harness smartphones’ unique capabilities such as multimedia and GPS-enabled geolocation to acquire data that’s faster, more nuanced and more accurate than ever before. With MFour, they can tap into a million-member all-mobile panel with proven demographic diversity and fast-response engagement.

Many thanks to Bob Lederer for putting a spotlight on this crucial issue and providing a balanced summary. We’re especially grateful that he addressed what he called the “huge representativeness problem” of how to reach Millennials, Hispanics and African Americans – the smartphone-focused, desktop- and laptop-abandoning  groups that elude surveys that remain wedded to online research methods.

We’re confident that the more MR professionals become aware that mobile research is not a commodity but a rare and demanding technological art, the more they’ll realize that turning to true masters of the mobile art will guide them past the perils of dwindling, unrepresentative panels and deliver them to new heights that the most advanced all-mobile methods can reach.

There’s mobile junk and mobile treasure – and the more this discussion continues in alert, consistently relevant and future-focused forums such as the Research Business Daily Report, the sooner our industry will get to know the difference and make the right choices.

The latest Greenbook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT) sounds a loud and clear alarm about the eroding quality of the survey panels that are the lifeblood of market research.

Check out this response by Michael Smith, MFour's Chief Product Officer and Director of Panel, which continues the conversation by detailing  the difference between advanced mobile research  that recruits and cultivates a large panel of smartphone users, and deficient imitations that masquerade as mobile while continuing to rely on outmoded online survey panels.

Greenbook's call to action could be a game-changer, and Smith's article details how MFour already has a game-changing answer for market researchers who are ready to respond to the panel crisis by trying true-mobile technology and a true-mobile panel.

MFour is bringing the very essence of market research to the MRMW conference in Fort Worth on Monday and Tuesday – the essence of market research being, well, doing market research.

Our two-man delegation of Andrew Fang, Vice President of Sales, (far left) and Andreas Hoelting, Product Manager of MFourDIY, will give a different kind of interactive presentation in a conference workshop Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Their presentation on MFourDIY will focus on learning by doing as attendees get the full story about the nation’s only all-mobile, do-it-yourself survey-building tool.

The core topic is “Creating A Location-Based Survey in Under 30 Minutes.” After showing you how to use the advanced Geo-location feature that allows you to field surveys to consumers while they’re shopping or just after they’ve left a store, Andreas will help you go to work – using the platform you’ve just seen described to field an actual survey of your own.

“We’ll tell them how we run surveys that get 1,000 completes in a day, and how we can repeat that with any retailer,” Andreas said. “Then I’ll lead them through creating their very own survey. They can program it however they want, then field the survey and  watch the data come in in real time." 

The only investment conferees need to make to get an actual research project done is the 90 minutes they’ll spend in the workshop. They’ll open their MFourDIY account, which is always free, not just to conference-goers, but to all visitors to the DIY website.

"People will go through the session, and the takeaway will be that `in one sitting I now have the most powerful survey tool in my hand," Andrew said. 

Apart from the workshop, Andrew and Andreas will be manning MFour’s exhibit throughout the conference on Monday and Tuesday. The concept at our booth is also interactive. “We’ll have two computers set up for visitors to play around with the DIY tool and see how easy it is to build a survey,” Andreas said.

Andrew and Andreas will be happy to go deeper with you at the conference by setting up a demo of DIY and MFour’s other all-mobile research capabilities.

So check us out -- not just to chat, but to do what you do best.

MFour Mobile Research has added Cristian Ghiurea to its Labs & Engineering department as a Software Engineer, the latest in a series of new hires in MFour’s rapid drive for growth and business expansion.

Cristian joins the team that develops and advances MFour’s systems for survey-based market research conducted strictly via mobile devices.

Cristian comes to MFour after working as senior software engineer for Two Nil, a media-marketing company, where he built proprietary media-buying platforms and a big-data warehouse.

MFour is doubling its staff to more than 100 by early 2017, with new hires across all departments.

MFour Mobile Research has quantified the extent of the Pokemon Go craze: fully a third of U.S. Android smartphone users 13 and over have downloaded the augmented reality game that's become the talk of the nation, surpassing Twitter as the most popular current mobile app.

MFour uses its App Tracker technology to identify all the apps downloaded by Android users among its million-member, all-mobile active panel. As of Tuesday, 33% of them were using Pokemon Go, exceeding the 30% who have Twitter.

Congratulations to all Pokemon Go enthusiasts -- we knew you were part of something big, and now we know just how big!

When it comes to MFour's signature Surveys on the Go® smartphone app, an enjoyable user experience is always uppermost in our mind.

So naturally we were struck by a fascinating article in the New Yorker about the original user experience for survey-takers. It shows how a form of survey was in circulation long before the advent of formal market-research questionnaires in the early 1900s – and that it was done just for fun, as a kind of parlor game.

Some very famous names played along during the 1800s, providing intriguing information about themselves.

New Yorker contributor Evan Kindley traces how people began passing around “confession albums” to friends and acquaintances, containing a series of questions about themselves and their views on life:

A fashionable parlor game originating among the Victorian literate classes, the “confession album”... presented a formulaic set of queries on each page—“What is your distinguishing characteristic,” for instance, or “What virtue do you most esteem?” The album’s owner would pass the volume around among her friends, collecting their comments as a kind of souvenir…” 

Among those who obliged, Kindley writes, were Karl Marx, Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, Oscar Wilde (author of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Kindley focuses particularly on a questionnaire filled out in 1886 by a 14-year-old Marcel Proust, who would grow up to be a leading pioneer of literary modernism with “In Search of Lost Time,” his epic series of seven novels published between 1913 and 1927.

“The Proust Questionnaire,” as it came to be known, resurfaced publicly in 1924, by which time Proust was two years dead, and very famous. His answers as a teenager were thought to foreshadow attitudes and ideas that were the germ of his great literary career and its themes.

Kindley, a Los Angeles writer who will delve further into the phenomenon in an upcoming book called “Questionnaire,” notes that the Proust Questionnaire’s renown gave rise to the common pop culture practice of publishing questionnaires filled out by famous people, including Vanity Fair magazine’s ongoing “Proust Questionnaire” feature.

Of course, the questionnaires that market researchers create and analyze are no parlor game. They’re finely-honed tools for collecting consumer data to inform business decisions that can affect a company’s fortunes and reverberate throughout the economy.

Still, we enjoy the thought that our enterprise is at least partly rooted  in something done strictly for the fun of it. In the case of Proust, the “parlor game” produced answers that generated what we in market research always strive for: useful insights.

But fun still counts. By making surveys easy and enjoyable  (as reflected in its consistent 4.5-star rating out of 5 in the App Store and Google Play), Surveys on the Go®  keeps MFour's million-member all-mobile active panel engaged. From that springs our ability to serve our clients' need for fast, validated and demographically representative data.

There’s nothing like a good point/counterpoint debate, and MFour cofounder and CEO Chris St. Hilaire makes his point about the capabilities of mobile research loud and clear in today’s bimonthly e-newsletter from Quirks’ Marketing Research Media.

Chris’s essay is a rejoinder to an article in the June edition of Quirk’s magazine, in which Australian researcher Philip Derham conducted a study of survey respondents from Down Under and found that many of them disliked taking surveys on their smartphones because of problems such as dropped signals that made it frustrating and often impossible to complete the questions.

Click here for Chris's full response published by Quirk's -- and for a further comment from Derham that we appreciate.

Our MFour leader (pictured) spells out the differences between bad mobile methods that led to the Australian study's dismal findings for mobile surveys, and the very different state-of-the-art methods and technologies that MFour deploys for its clients.

“Technologies and panel-recruitment methods can differ radically between flawed and optimal approaches, yet all are lumped in the same `mobile’ category,’” Chris observes. “There is, in fact, good mobile and bad mobile, and the study published in Quirk’s uncovers precisely what’s wrong with the bad stuff.”

In his comment following up on Chris's essay, Derham writes that state of the art mobile technology is not yet available to market researchers in Australia, but "I appreciate the discussion and the exchange of ideas that enables our industry to strengthen the range of tools and techniques available for us all, so we can choose the most appropriate, not just the one someone  has available."

“All roads lead to Rome” was a proud boast about economic power that resounded through the ancient world.

Today’s economic reality is that all paths lead to purchase – but the question is how to get shoppers to beat a path to one’s own door – whether it’s an eCommerce portal or a bricks-and-mortar store. The roads to Rome were many; the paths to sales today are all but infinite. This is an immense business opportunity – but also a huge challenge.

Attendees at next week’s OmniShopper conference in Chicago will be looking for answers about how to nudge today’s shoppers in directions their companies or research clients want them to go. Which is why MFour is sending a two-man delegation. We’ll be there to help attendees take an all-mobile path to research and retail success by gleaning essential data and insights showing what shoppers want and how they decide to buy.

Senior Solutions Executives Alex Colao (far left) and Scott Worthge will be at OmniShopper to talk about the all-encompassing reality of today’s commerce – that we’re living in a Smartphone Empire. Users’ mobile devices are taking them where they want to go electronically, and shaping their shopping behavior along with everything else.

MFour and its Surveys on the Go® proprietary app are the best way to get in touch with the new empire’s citizens to get the answers you need.

Visit Alex and Scott at MFour’s exhibit and they’ll tell you about:

• How our panel of more than a million mobile users can generate the fast, validated and demographically representative data researchers need.

• How our superior, extra-accurate Geo-location capabilities will take you right to the point of purchase throughout the U.S., pushing surveys to the consumers you want at the locations you need, at the moment it matters most.

• How you can segment and target our panel by the apps its members use, and by the shopping sites they’ve visited.

Today’s retailers already are awash in data they’ve collected about their customers –more of it than they can sift through productively. MFour’s role is to help turn that data into a more precise guide to following up with the questions you still need answered.

“We give brands and researchers the ability to find out what they don’t know” amid the data glut, says Alex. “We put them in touch. With people shopping in all these different ways, the mobile phone is a big player in how they do it. If you want to know how mobile users are shopping, what better way than to survey them while they're shopping? With our smartphone panel, MFour can make it happen."

So if you’re heading to OmniShopper, look for the MFour green in the exhibit area and stop by for a friendly and informative chat. Whatever research road you’re traveling, Alex and Scott will tell you how accessing the state-of-the art in mobile capabilities will get you where you want to go.

We’ve been noting regularly that the market research industry faces a potentially disastrous problem because it no longer can trust obsolete panel-recruitment methods to find the numbers and types of respondents needed to produce reliable survey data.

And we’ve been emphasizing that the answer is state-of-the art, all-mobile research. MFour’s clients harness the special capabilities of smartphones for solutions at both ends of the research equation: engaging a reliable and effective panel, and getting ironclad data from them using a special mobile survey app and advanced Geo-location technology.

Now comes word from Las Vegas about a case in which the panel problem turned into a nightmare and generated a fascinating lawsuit. It ended with a judge’s ruling against a company that was supposed to recruit respondents for a research firm’s casino-related study, but allegedly resorted to dishonest means to fill out the panel (thanks to MRWeb’s Daily Research News for publishing the first report).

A Research Nightmare: “Gross misrepresentation”

Here’s how it went down, according to court records and news releases from James Industry Research Group (JIR), which successfully sued for damages.

Las Vegas-based JIR was engaged by a slot machine manufacturer to oversee a “players test” of its gaming equipment by a panel of casino gamblers. JIR hired another Nevada company, ACR Business Resources, to recruit the 40 respondents. 

JIR staff members became suspicious as they tried to contact the 40 recruits by phone as part of a routine validation process. They found that screening criteria hadn’t been followed. A JIR news release about the case said that it suspected “falsification” and “gross misrepresentation of respondent data.” It fired ACR and recruited a new panel on its own.

Jim James, the JIR President, said he sued more on principle than to recoup the cost of ACR’s failure.

“Cheating is wrong,” James said. “We’ve seen this type of data fabrication previously….When companies within our industry operate without data integrity, it’s a detriment to all of us.”

JIR sued for $5,531 in a small claims court in Henderson, NV., according to court records; ACR and its principal, Carol Greco, countersued for a similar amount. Judge Rodney Burr found in favor of JIR and awarded it a $2,606 judgment, plus $181 in court costs. In JIR’s recent announcement of the case’s outcome, the victorious James offered to provide a “roadmap for how we presented our case” to other market researchers who’ve been burned by data fabrication or falsification issues and want to file claims.

MFour applauds James and his company for insisting on honest research and congratulates them for winning redress.

All-Mobile Panel Recruitment is No Gamble

We’d also like to point the way for research firms and corporate consumer research departments to immunize themselves against panel recruitment that’s fraudulent, or even merely flawed: the all-mobile approach pioneered by MFour, which includes automatic validation of panelists and their responses. We’ve even deployed it on the gambling strip in Las Vegas.

 “With GPS technology inherent in mobile devices, we know when and how often respondents visit casinos,” said Michael Smith, MFour’s Chief Product Officer & Director of Panel. “Using this trusted validation technique, we’ve accomplished multiple studies” for casino industry clients.

The most recent one, Smith said, involved “monitoring out-of-towners’ visits to six separate casinos on the strip. We wanted to know what drew them to these major casinos, how often, and for how long.”

Recruiting the right panel to receive the right questions at the right time doesn’t have to be a gamble – even in the heart of Las Vegas. Market researchers just need to know that state-of-the-art mobile is the way to place their bets.

MFour Mobile Research welcomes a new member to its Operations team, continuing the rapid expansion that will double the company’s size from about 50 employees early this year to more than 100 by early 2017.

Project Manager Spencer Hall will help push the continuing advancement of MFour’s services and capabilities as it carries out state-of-the art, all-mobile survey-based research for clients who include leading market research firms, corporations and brands.

Spencer previously did consumer and market research for Modern AlkaMe, designer of a digital platform for calibrating dietary supplement regimes according to data collected from users’ biometric devices. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from California State University, Long Beach.