Market research fuels business. 

By doing market research, you can explore what your market needs, test ideas before investing heavily, track success over time, and adjust your strategy to lift your sales.

Here are 5 great reasons to consider doing a research project with us.

1. You want to create a new product or service
    
   Ever seen a new product flop, hard? It’s not a pretty picture.
    
   Strangely enough, it happens all the time, even at the enterprise level. At MFour, we see this as a missed opportunity. When you understand the true needs of potential customers and existing clients, you don’t fail. The answer is to conduct thorough research ahead of time to capitalize on sales and revenue.
    
2. You want to enter a new market
    
   When a new location, it’s helpful to know what the future looks like. Surveying the market ahead of time is a great indicator for what the health of that opportunity is. For example, if your business is looking into selling in other states, surveying consumers in those states can help you know how well you’ll do. You can also get a sneak peek at the competition, by talking to consumers who frequent your competitors’ locations. It’s great intel.
    
3. You want to target a new type of buyer
    
   It’s hard to know your existing buyers like the back of your hand (what’s that spot?!).
    
   This is even more true with new buyers. Going after a new consumer means accurately understanding their wants and needs, and learning how to speak their language. A survey offers welcome relief. It’s actual feedback from the people you want to reach. And it’s easy to do, you can get the data you need by surveying a consumer panel with hundreds of demographic data points. Let them tell you want they want.
    
4. You want to run a large Out-of-Home advertisement
    
   Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising has the strongest ROI of any media source, if you can measure it. However, understanding ad effectiveness in OOH is more challenging than other channels, because it’s not digital.
    
   Good market researchers can understand the impact of their OOH campaigns by researching what consumers are thinking in the moment the see their signs. Using a consumer group, and sending a survey when they pass you billboard offers real, unfiltered, and accurate feedback.
    
5. You want to beef up your customer service department
    
   Customer service is a higher priority than ever. For retail locations, they’re your biggest key to sales. If your organization wants to win on customer service, it’s important to uncover the issues to solve within the department. Again, we can help you design the right market research survey to figure this out.

Of course, there are many other reasons to do market research. If you’re interested in learning more about our market research solutions, click here. If you’d like to learn about the 7 step process to conducting market research, click here.

Trying to measure advertising ROI occupies the workdays (and perhaps some sleepless nights) of Chief Marketing Officers, brand managers and consumer insights specialists the world over. The problem is that advertising ROI as it’s commonly measured might as well stand for Really Only Inferences. In the absence of real data from real consumers, measurement quickly becomes supposition.

Things were so much better 4,000 years ago. That’s when the first marketers began branding products and measuring the impact on sales. And they had the benefit of using real data from real consumers to measure the return on their branding efforts.

According to scholarship published in the Journal of Macromarketing, if a friend invited you over to dinner during the Shang Dynasty in China (2000-1500 BC), chances are you’d be served from pottery marked with symbols unique to its maker, who was also its marketer. And if you admired your host’s serving bowls, the symbol on them would surely catch your eye and prompt you to ask who made them. And that would be the first step toward product awareness, intent to purchase, and, eventually, to a sale. The maker’s investment of time and effort in festooning bowls with branding symbols would have earned a nice return.

That ancient Chinese potter had a huge advantage over many 21^st Century marketing, advertising and consumer insights professionals when it came to understanding ROI. The potter could engage each actual buyer in person, and understand exactly what motivated each purchase. 

Now the direct connection to feedback from actual consumers largely has vanished. In attempting to measure ROI for Out of Home advertising, for example, today’s marketing and insights professionals are forced to fall back on inferences from data that may be tangential or even irrelevant to the actual purchase.

For example, one common but flawed method for measuring ROI is to make estimates based on raw traffic counts. The assumption is that people who passed by a highway billboard or another form of OOH advertising were in fact aware of the sign, the brand and the product. And that the sign played a significant part in driving them to shop and buy. That’s a lot to assume.

Another method, more grounded in today’s technology, uses mobile geolocation to determine that a particular consumer’s smartphone (and therefore its owner) passed in view of a sign, and subsequently was geolocated at a store carrying the advertised product. Third-party data such as apps detected on that consumer’s smartphone also might enter the mix as another input for spitting out inferred ROI metrics. Still, what’s missing from that algorithmic equation is the reality obtainable only from known and validated consumers. 

Here’s what’s often assumed or inferred in today’s standard methods for estimating advertising ROI:

• That an OOH ad helped cause a store visit, rather than merely correlating with it.

• That knowing which apps a consumer has downloaded is sufficient for making accurate inferences about who that consumer is. For example, whether he or she is a he or a she, and belongs to a consumer segment the OOH campaign is meant to target.

• That an upswing in sales of the advertised product during or just after the campaign is by itself a trustworthy indicator that the campaign was a key driver of the added revenue.

• For example, a sunblock brand may fly off the shelves during an OOH campaign, but the real driver could be a heatwave, rather than the advertising.

So what should marketers and researchers do to recapture the advantages Chinese artisans of 2000 BC enjoyed when it came to getting real marketing and advertising ROI metrics from real people?

The answer begins with identifying and surveying real consumers who’ve had validated exposure to an OOH campaign. As for the rest, it will cost you a click to find out – so just click here.

MFour is delighted to be the newest member of DPAA (Digital Place Based Advertising Association), a global organization that provides leadership for the Digital Out of Home industry, serving as a nexus for information, marketing, and connections and collaborations. 

"MFour…is at the heart of why advertising on digital out-of-home media is growing so rapidly,” said Barry Frey, DPAA President and CEO.

“What we can do is extremely helpful to digital out-of-home advertisers and others in the OOH space,” added Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s CEO and co-founder. “We are honored to be joining DPAA, and look forward to sharing what we’ve learned with our fellow members.”

To read the DPAA’s full announcement, click here.MFour enables OOH advertisers to observe opted-in consumers’ location journeys in real time, then survey them soon after an ad exposure or after any other relevant experience. To set up a live demo, just get in touch by clicking here.