Football season is back (yessss!!), and with it comes a tip for consumer insights pros: one of the key performance indicators for a market research team’s success is how well it can intercept consumers during their natural buying journeys.

In the NFL, interceptions are often game-changers, and it takes a rare combination of talent and skill to intercept. The key attributes are quickness and anticipation, and an uncanny knack for being in just the right position when the ball is in the air.

Quickness and being in the right place at the right time are also crucial to collecting quality consumer data that will give decision-making stakeholders the field position they need to advance their companies’ or brands’ marketing and sales goals.

In theory, retailers can get reliable (albeit seldom timely) data on what’s actually being bought. But they get no real insight into customers' motivations – the "why" behind the "what." The problem becomes exponentially harder when the subject is non-buying behavior. Who entered a store but failed to buy everything they’d intended to purchase? What did they not buy? Why did it happen, and how much revenue did the store leave on the table?

The answers, and the ability to defend against non-buying, won’t be forthcoming unless customer experience research teams learn how to intercept.

There’s no better way to collect premium data than by intercepting it from consumers naturally, and in real time, as they go about their daily buying journeys. So in the spirit of NFL players poring over game film to get a competitive edge, let’s look at a case study that illustrates how natural intercepts work.

The Problem: Researchers for a leading retail chain that does a huge volume in CPG sales were trying to tackle one of their business’s most frustrating problems: losing revenue because many customers who entered a store didn't buy everything they had intended to purchase.

The Answer: For the retail chain in question, all it took was a discussion with MFour reps about GeoValidation^® – a proprietary capability driven by the advanced GPS technology embedded in the Surveys on the Go^® research app. Clients track app-using U.S. consumers’ movements and verify when they arrive and then leave a location of research interest.

• In this case, all members of MFour’s first-party consumer panel who entered one of the client’s stores were located on arrival, and received a push notification of a survey opportunity upon departure.

• When they responded – with a 25% response rate within an hour and 50% within 24 hours – the process of intercept followed by data return was complete.

• Qualifiers for the study were 400 consumers nationwide, who said they had not purchased everything they had intended to buy.

• In beauty products, 31% of non-purchasers cited price as the factor that discouraged them from buying; 37% said they had simply been unable to find the item they wanted, or that it was not available.

• For shoppers looking for personal care products, 31% cited price and 28% cited unavailability or inability to find the intended item.

• Among candy and snack intenders, 20% said they didn’t buy because of pricing, and 24% because what they wanted wasn’t there or couldn’t be found.

• Among grocery and beverage shoppers who said they had left without an item they had arrived intending to purchase, 44% cited price and 24% said items were not available or couldn’t be found.

• Asked whether they were satisfied with their overall shopping experience, 57% of non-buyers rated their visit as an 8 or a 9 on a nine-point satisfaction scale. 24% graded their experience in the poor to middling range (1 to 6 on the scale).

The study gave the client clarity on factors that were costing it millions in revenue each day nationwide, and potentially alienating many customers. The previously unobtainable data from natural intercepts gave researchers their first clearly-informed look at the problem, so they could recommend a game plan to win back the sales and revenue that the chain’s stores were letting slide through their hands.

For an informative and productive conversation about how to program natural intercepts into your research game plan, just click here.

Here’s a consumer insight that retailers can etch in stone: if you don't make shopping easy and convenient, consumers will abandon you, and competitors who do it better will swoop in and grab them and their wallets for themselves.

A recent RetailDive mobile commerce newsletter gives further evidence that inconvenience is a killer. It reports a recent study by Splitit, a digital payments solutions company, in which  87% of online shoppers surveyed said they would abandon their shopping carts during checkout if the process was too difficult – with 55% saying they would never return.

Inconvenience also is a killer for consumer research, because consumer research is, in fact, a B2C sell. If this assertion surprises you, it’s time to take a broader view. 

Yes, consumer research is, of course, a B2B transaction between research suppliers and their clients. But what’s being supplied and bought is consumer data. And there will be no consumer data, or at least none worth having, if you fail to sell consumers on providing it in an engaged and thoughtful way. So before it can become a B2B offering, consumer research needs to be a B2C success. 

If you make it inconvenient for consumers to access research experiences and fail to make those experiences easy and enjoyable, you’ll end up with the equivalent of those abandoned online shopping carts – too few consumers, too little reliable data, and, eventually, not enough business to sustain your research enterprise. Unrepresentative data, insufficient data and unreliable data are certainly beyond-inconvenient to the ultimate consumers of consumer research: the business decision-makers who expect reliable guidance grounded in validated consumer reality.

MFour’s value proposition is quality mobile data made possible by an engaging, pain-free, and seamlessly convenient survey experience for the consumers who download our standard-setting mobile research app. More than 100,000 of our Surveys On The Go^® (SOTG) app users have spoken for themselves about their experiences by posting comments and ratings in the Apple and Google Play app stores. SOTG perpetually enjoys an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.

Here are other metrics that reflect what our survey-app users' convenience and satisfaction have meant for MFour's clients:

• 25% response rates within an hour, and 50% within one day.

• 95% completion rates for surveys with LOI of 20+ minutes.

• 85% participation in follow-up surveys for consumer diaries and other multi-phase studies.

The takeaway is that the people on our panel are not checked out from consumer research. To learn what that can mean for your specific research projects, just click here.

 Amazon's fourth annual "Prime Day" was a day to forget for major bricks-and-mortar retailers, including Walmart.

How do we know? All it took was a quick glance at the store-visit data on MFour's Path-2-Purchase™ Platform. There, platform users instantly see customer journeys to all locations of more than 1,000 retailers nationwide.

The data showed that visits to Walmarts sank to 90-day lows on July 16-17 – coinciding with the 36-hour Prime Day promotion in which Amazon Prime members enjoy the biggest discounts of the year. Walmart's foot traffic for Monday, July 16, was 12% lower than its Monday average over the previous three months, excluding the busy Monday of the long Memorial Day weekend.

Whether it's Prime Day or any other day, Path-2-Purchase™ is an unprecedented tool for consumer insights professionals to understand the journeys and motivations of validated, first-party consumers. Its core functions enable researchers to target, track and survey the most relevant consumers, and to append their historical visitation data to provide deep context to any study. Validation is another core value, based on observed location journeys, unique mobile device identifiers, and precise consumer profiles.

Target: to check Prime Day's impact on bricks-and-mortar stores, we did simple targeting based on nationwide visits to a single retailer, Walmart. But Path-2-Purchase™ lets you visualize where consumers go and who they are in granular detail, segmenting by more than 250 demographic and psychographic points and by 12.5 million U.S. locations, including all outposts of the top 1,000 retailers.

Track: consumer-journey tracking options are exhaustive. For example, you can identify and track Walmart's habitual Monday visitors. Track them on the days of their Walmart visits, including where they go just before and after shopping at Walmart. Then see where they go during the same hours on all other days of the week.

Survey: identify loyal Walmart shoppers and ask them whether they used Prime Day to buy products they customarily would shop for at Walmart. Or identify consumers who have the Amazon app for specific insights into their Prime Day spending and experiences. 

Append: after taking a snapshot of your relevant consumers' latest actions and attitudes, contextualize by accessing data from a Consumer Knowledge Center that shows where the same research participants have gone in the past. 

Validate: No need to ask respondents whether they've shopped at a Walmart in the past 90 days, where, and how often. You already know all of that.

Like Amazon, Path-2-Purchase™ is a platform full of endless possibilities. It's comprehensive, convenient, and efficient. To access the platform for a self-guided demo, just click here. And to set up a live, one-on-one discussion about how Path-2-Purchase™ and MFour's other solutions can fill your projects' specific needs, just click here.

Serve free Slurpees, get 53% more customers.

That was the sweet deal for 7-Eleven in its annual July 11 Slurpee giveaway, in honor of July 11 being 7-11. We were able to quickly quantify this huge spike in nationwide store traffic because we track U.S. consumers’ shopping journeys 24-7 on our Path-2-Purchase™ Platform.

Platform users get location-visit data that’s updated daily, encompassing visits to 12.5 million commercially relevant locations nationwide, including all outlets of the top 1,000 U.S. retailers.

And here’s why it matters, using the 7-Eleven Day giveaway as an example.

• What will happen in the days and weeks following 7-Eleven customers’ big Slurpee binge? Will the surge in traffic be nice and sticky, or will it melt away like a cup of ice in the summer heat? Answers are at your fingertips, because Path-2-Purchase™ is always on, providing an inexhaustible fountain of validated consumer-journey intelligence for everyone.

• Did 7-Eleven’s free Slurpees peel away customers who typically go to a different store for cold drinks, gasoline, and other C-store sundries? You can identify other brands’ frequent visitors and see whether they defected to 7-Eleven on 7-11 to get that free refreshment. And you can keep tracking them as time goes on, to see whether it was a one-day stand, or whether they are now going steady with 7-Eleven.

• What kinds of product giveaways would work for a different C-Store or for a Quick-Serve Restaurant? With Path-2-Purchase™ you can identify and target consumers who visited 7-Eleven on free Slurpee day, and send them a survey. Ask what they thought of 7-Eleven’s giveaway, and what kinds of items they’d go out of their way to get for free at another chain’s stores. 

• Do the same kind of research around any retailer or brand’s major promotion, whether it’s daylong, weeklong, or monthlong.

Like everybody else, consumer insights professionals are waiting to see what’s in store for the U.S. retail market as new tariffs on imported goods kick in. But no matter what’s happening in global, national or regional economies, whether positive or negative, brands and researchers need to be plugged in to the best data streams they can access. In tense times for the economy, good, data-driven decision-making becomes all the more important.

In the case of the current tension over tariffs, the conditions businesses must respond to are changing literally by the day. Earlier this week, the National Retail Federation (NRF) had provided some baseline statistics reflecting conditions and key indicators as they had stood before the first round of tariff increases. Based on those, the NRF had predicted that we wouldn’t see significant declines in imports or retail revenues despite the tariffs, because of inelasticity in supply chains and consumer demand. 

“Retailers cannot easily or quickly change their global supply chains, so imports from China and elsewhere are expected to continue to grow for the foreseeable future,” Jonathan Gold, NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy, said in the release dated July 9. At retail checkouts and store aisles, he added, the tariffs “will mean higher prices for Americans rather than significant changes to international trade.”

But the NRF adopted a far more alarmed tone just a day later, when President Trump announced a much greater escalation in tariffs on products from China. 

"The threat to the U.S. economy is not a question of ‘if’ and more about ‘when’ and ‘how bad,’' the NRF said in response, in a press release headlined "Retailers Say New Tariffs Against China Will Boomerang Back to Harm U.S. Families and Workers."

The bottom line, the NRF now predicts, is that "tariffs on such a broad scope of products make it inconceivable that American consumers will dodge this tax increase as prices of everyday products will be forced to rise. And the retaliation that will follow will destroy thousands of U.S. jobs and hurt farmers, local businesses and entire communities."

Before the latest announcement of the administration's intent to ratchet up tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, the NRF had forecast an increase of about 4% in retail revenues this year (excluding automobiles, gas stations and restaurants) -- down from the 7.8% increase recorded in 2017, but still a year of growth. Now it's hard to predict what might ensue over the coming six months.

In times both calm and nervous -- perhaps especially when times are nervous -- brands need to stay closely in touch with consumers to keep making the best decisions under whatever circumstances prevail. Whether they are exploiting opportunities when conditions favor growth, or defending market share when the going gets difficult, retailers and product marketers need data they can rely on to help drive the right decisions.

One thing that won't be changing is the the accuracy and validation marketers and consumer insights professionals will access from a state-of-the-art mobile app research app that's used by a representative, first-party  panel of mobile consumers. Connecting with respondents with a mobile app opens doors to unique, location-based research possibilities, including collecting passive data showing consumers' journeys along the entire path to purchase. Smartphones' multimedia functions power further capabilities, such as asking for "video selfie" responses in which interviewees provide vivid, in-their-own-words feedback.

Bad data can itself be viewed as a kind of tariff on business success, but it's a tax that no business needs to pay. To learn how app-powered surveys, observational location tracking and other advanced mobile capabilities can meet your specific projects’ needs, you're invited to set up a demo session with a mobile-app research expert from MFour. Just click here.