It’s often said that memories make life worth living. But in consumer insights, too often they make life a headache.

Yes, we’re talking about recall bias, which is the error that occurs when survey respondents give answers based on faulty recall. It’s a harsh reality that while memories are made to be cherished, the reason we cherish them is because they are so easily lost. And in market research, data infected by recall bias compromises everything.

As the authors of a 2017 scholarly study examining recall bias put it, “simple…recall questions generate large measurement errors.” The study focused on a survey by the Canadian government in which respondents were asked how much they had spent on food over the previous four weeks. The answers consistently underestimated actual expenditures, compared to data from subsequent diary studies involving the very same respondents (the authors noted that the diary phase was considered more reliable, but had accuracy problems of its own because of data-distorting factors such as respondents growing tired of having to record expenses each day).

The good news is there’s now an almost surefire remedy for recall bias in consumer research. But first, let’s dig a bit deeper into the problem, by asking you to take a very quick survey.

• How often have you eaten quick-serve restaurant food in the past two weeks?

• How many times have you stopped for gas over the past four weeks?
  
  
• When did you last pass by a billboard for [fill in the name of the brand or product]? 

• Do you like being asked questions you can’t properly answer?

That last one is rhetorical and perhaps a bit facetious. But the fact is, recall-based research happens all the time, and it puts insights professionals in the uncomfortable position of having to present recommendations to decision-makers that the researchers know are tainted by recall bias. Until now there has been no reliable and affordable alternative, except to accept recall bias as a fact of life and hope it doesn't distort data too badly.

But now there is.

Users of the new Path-2-Purchase™ Platform are putting recall bias behind them. They’re targeting mobile consumers by leveraging smartphones’ GPS features to find real people in real time and in the most relevant places, for in-the-moment, Point-of-Emotion^® research. Instead of asking about experiences from a week ago, they’re getting insights into what their consumers just did – or are doing right now – along with vivid and trustworthy feedback on why they’re doing it and how it makes them feel.

It’s also important to note that with Path-2-Purchase™ you don’t have to even ask a question to learn how many times a consumer has been to a gas station or a quick serve restaurant over the past two or four weeks. Respondents opt in for location tracking that automatically tells you where, when, how often and for how long they’ve been in a given location. You can use that information to build a perfectly-tailored questionnaire. You also can track whether they’ve come in view of your brand’s billboards.

Early adopters of Path-2-Purchase™ Platform are beating recall bias at last, and so will you. For a one-on-one demo of how it can fill your projects' specific needs, just click here.

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!

What if the expression, “find a needle in a haystack,” were an actual job description? Chances are there wouldn’t be many applicants. 

In our era of Big Data (an unprecedented information haystack that might as well be infinite), the consumer insights profession has been trying to figure out how to fit in. Is traditional, survey-based research at risk of being perceived as less relevant, or even outdated, in the face of so many bytes of digital information collected from customers?

The issues are well-framed in "How Customer Insight Can Be a Powerful Business Partner,” a recent article by authors from Boston Consulting Group’s Center for Customer Insight, in partnership with Cambiar and the Yale School of Management’s Center for Customer Insights. These passages really stood out (the italics are ours):

• “Consumers’ online and mobile activities leave a digital trail, giving companies vital insight about where to reach them; data on things such as their interests, habits, and choices, which may correlate to shopping decisions; and how to predict and influence future behaviors and purchases. Many organizations, though, lack the capabilities to follow that digital trail.”

• “[Companies] must ensure that [insights] leaders and practitioners can… adopt more creative methods, and leverage new data sources.”

• “The goal is to combine structured data with rich unstructured, qualitative data, including information on consumers’ emotional needs…”

These observations all point to the key challenge facing the insights profession: how to seamlessly integrate and enrich passive, observed behavioral data with qualitative and emotional insights to tell the whole story about real consumer journeys. A new solution called Path-2-Purchase™ Platform finally lets you overcome obstacles and meet the challenge with one-source, first-party observed and qualitative data. The result is validated consumer insights for everyone.

• For the first time, corporate researchers and brand stewards can access a single source that combines Big Data tracking of mobile consumers’ digital footprints with real-time, right-place surveys to illuminate their motivations and emotions all along the path to purchase. 

• Observational data from tracking 2 million carefully profiled and representative U.S. consumers’ journeys across 12.5 million locations becomes more valuable when it intersects with the ability to find targeted individuals in-the-moment and survey them immediately.  

• Being able to see who’s going where empowers researchers to identify important but previously off-the-radar consumer segments to reach out to and understand. 

• Instead of drawing inferences and modeling consumer profiles based on third party data, insights are driven by first-party data from known and validated consumers.

• Data is collected and stored in a Consumer Knowledge Center, where it’s available to enhance understanding and target surveys to precisely the right respondents for a given product or service.

You can learn more about Path-To-Purchase™ in a one-on-one conversation; feel free to schedule it just by clicking here. And for the full text of the article referenced above, click here.

Pictured: Path-2-Purchase™ Platform dashboard

Below is a hypothetical customer satisfaction survey for a casual dining restaurant chain. It looks like a lot of standard surveys that are regularly fielded, but in fact the design is woefully outdated. We’ll tell you why, and what you can do about it.

First, take a look and ask yourself which questions you wish you could replace or eliminate, because you know the data will be compromised by recall bias and other issues that beset stated response questionnaires.

Q1: Have you been to [restaurant chain name] in the past 14 days?

Q2: Please give the location of the restaurant, by city and, if possible, the district or street.

Q3: How often do you eat at a [chain name] restaurant?

Q4: Did you eat at any of these other restaurants during the past 14 days? [showing a list of four competing chains]

Q5: How often do you eat at [the competitors’ restaurants]?

Q6 – Q13: [a series of customer satisfaction and net promoter score questions about the respondent’s most recent visit to the client’s restaurant.]

Q14-Q21: [Identical customer satisfaction questions about the most recent visit to a competitor’s restaurant.]

It’s the first five questions that are problematic. The inadequacy of Q1 to Q5 compromises the reliability of the remainder of the survey, because stated answers about visitation over time just aren’t very trustworthy. Do you remember which restaurants you visited over the past two weeks? Do you still have a strong impression and an accurate, specific recall of the experience, including what you ordered and how friendly and efficient your server was? How satisfied or dissatisfied you were – and why?

So how do you avoid compromising your data about consumer experience and consumer satisfaction? Instead of asking problematic questions about who, where, when and how often, businesses can leverage the groundbreaking Path-2-Purchase™ Platform and see at a glance where real, validated consumers have gone, hour by hour, day by day, across 12.5 million U.S. locations, including all locations of the top 1,000 retailers. Here’s some of what Path-2-Purchase™ delivers:

• Archived, comprehensive location and visitation data that lets you identify brand loyalists and brand rejectors before you’ve even started.

• Survey targeting based on locations, visits and detailed, validated profiles of the industry’s largest proprietary, all-mobile consumer panel.

• The ability to field in-store or after-visit surveys that all but eliminate recall bias.

• “Why” answers you can trust because you’ve asked them at the Point-of-Emotion^® where decisions and experiences are vividly in your respondents’ minds.

• Validation by photo capture of purchase receipts or other identifying images.

• Vivid, in-their-own words insights from “video selfies” you can ask respondents to make about a dining or shopping or product-use experience, while it’s happening or just after the event.

In short, Path-2-Purchase™ gives you a big head start without even having to ask “who,” “when,” “where” and “how often.” You can focus confidently on the crucial “why,” knowing you’ll get data from the right respondents, with recall bias neutralized. It’s accurate, efficient, and simply better, because it’s categorically different from stated-answer surveys taken by poorly validated, multi-sourced panelists.

To set up a one-on-one demo about how Path-2-Purchase™ Platform delivers validated consumer insights for everyone, just click here.