Looking ahead to 2017, the panel crisis in market research is certain to remain one of the industry’s most important focuses. The most recent GreenBook Report on Industry Trends (GRIT) described the online panel crisis as “an existential threat” to consumer research. Without a new strategy to engage quality panelists, the report said, survey-based approaches will enter a “death spiral.”

Survey providers noticed – SurveyMonkey, for one, announced a new move into analyzing data from mobile apps, aimed at business clients. “Mobile will be the leading platform in which businesses connect with customers,” SurveyMonkey’s CEO said at the time. Mobile is winning – and it’s winning big. In fact, GreenBook characterizes mobile research as “mainstream,” with its latest survey showing that mobile is in fact the most-used method – used by 75% of respondents. Online communities were a distant second – used by 59% of respondents.

It’s well established that traditional online research methods are failing to capture accurate insights from a mobile-centric consumer base. So-called “mobile optimized” surveys that attempt to shoehorn online survey formats onto mobile screens are no solution. They don’t have the seamless functionality of app-based true-mobile surveys – and without seamless functionality, there’s no hope of making a trusting, one-to-one connection with real mobile consumers.

When done right, on the other hand, the true-mobile approach extends the great traditions of market research and allows them to thrive in the smartphone era. Consider the following:

• Big Data about mobile use or social media use isn’t enough. To truly know consumers, you have to ask them what they’re thinking and feeling, instead of solely relying on Big Data insights on broader behavioral patterns.

• “90% of Time on Mobile is Spent in Apps,” says a study by Flurry analytics. In other words, trying to conduct online surveys via mobile is like trying to catch fish in a puddle. App-based true-mobile research puts surveys in harmony with the ways in which consumers want to receive and exchange information on their phones.

• Getting consumers to engage with surveys so that they will tell you what they think and feel is no easy matter. Failure to engage is what’s killing online surveys – and it’s not just poor survey design, but a case of operating in entirely the wrong sector of the information/communications universe.

• Engaging consumers on mobile is the obvious solution, but it’s extremely hard to do. SurveyMonkey’s insight earlier this year that mobile apps are the gateway to important consumer data was on target, but the postscript is that the company recently announced it was abandoning its mobile data initiative after just eight months. Execution and relevance to clients’ needs are crucial – and take years of technological effort to perfect.

• The problem isn’t that consumers are impatient with mobile surveys. It’s that they’re downright dismissive of any experience on their phones and with their apps that doesn’t live up to their extremely high expectations of smooth-functioning elegance and convenience – the qualities that make using their phones so appealing in the first place.

• So-called mobile solutions that simply usher smartphone users to a website where a survey is housed will not provide the true-mobile experience that’s a must for productive research engagement.

• The only way to get the reliable and representative sample that eludes online surveys is to use the right technology, which means harnessing a native app that embeds the survey experience instantly in the phone itself and allows respondents to answer offline.

A good, fast, and cost-efficient way to explore true-mobile research and compare it to the online-centered mobile you may be using now is to try MFourDIY™ – the only app-centered, true-mobile DIY alternative. For details, please visit mfourdiy.com or contact Alex at acolao@mfour.com.

Here's your Friday roundup of 3 items from the MFour blog to keep you up to speed on mobile research as you head into the weekend.

• 5 Ways to Filter Out Faulty Information

• 9 Insights into Holiday Shopping

• Why a Happy Panel Delivers Great Data

And here's a Friday tune to stoke your holiday spirits.

Heading to Park City for CASRO conference? We'll be there too... here's our booth, come check us out! 

MFour is there in (hopefully) sunny Boca Raton, Florida at TMRE this  week. Make sure to find us at booth #420 and we'll talk mobile.

If you're at CRC Corporate Researchers conference this week in San Francisco, check out our booth #401 and let's talk mobile!

Todd Costello has joined the MFour Mobile Research team as a Senior Solutions Executive, continuing an expansion that will double the MFour staff to more than 100 in 2017. He is a 12-year veteran of market research, with broad experience in data collection, sales and client service.

Todd is president of the Marketing Research Assn.’s Southern California Chapter, having served previously as president of the Philadelphia and Atlanta-Southeast Chapters. At MFour he will reach out to new and established clients to understand their research needs, alert them to unique mobile research solutions, and provide service and consultation throughout a project. He comes to MFour after owning and operating his own data collection company, CMR Services.

Todd previously was a Senior Account Executive for Marketing Systems Group. He is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, with a degree in International Business & Marketing. When not spending free time with his wife and their year-old daughter, Todd can be found off the coast, fishing from his kayak and landing big ones that he loves to grill himself. Welcome aboard, Todd!

MFour’s fast-growing staff now includes Anna Pabiadzimskaya and Anthony Nguyen, who’ll bolster the Operations team as Research Associates. They’ll help carry forward our commitment to top-quality service in fielding and monitoring clients’ projects. Their arrival continues an expansion that will see MFour double its staff to more than 100 in early 2017.

Anna is a recent graduate of California State Polytechnic Institute, Pomona, with a degree in Business Administration. She’s done marketing research with Lieberman Research Worldwide, and marketing and social media work for the nonprofit Hands For Africa.

Anthony arrives with a recent degree in Business Information Management from the University of California, Irvine. He’s done marketing work for Beacon Pointe Wealth Advisors. Anthony knows what it means to never skip a beat, having hosted a weekly electronic music and hip hop show on KUCI in Irvine.

Remember the sound of a video cassette recorder in full-on rewind or fast-forward mode? If not, count yourself lucky. That high-pitched rattling, shuddering noise was annoying on its own demerits – and the displeasure only deepened because it would go on for a clattering eternity while you waited for the clunky machine to take your tape back to the beginning, in case you wanted to watch it again.

At the time it was the best we had, and it got the job done.

The news, from CNN, that the last VCR manufacturer will stop production later this month got us thinking about how creative destruction is the essence of technology. DVD and DVR killed the VCR, and now video streaming is threatening the DVD.

There are obvious resonances in this for market research. We, too, are living through the creative destruction that’s needed to move us forward.

Few VCR users were deeply invested in their machines. They were only too happy to snap up a DVD player. But in MR, the investment in yesterday’s technology – the online survey -- is deeply embedded. There’s still reluctance to take the next step forward to superior, all-mobile survey technology.

The analogy can only extend so far: quaint as they will be, the last VCRs to ship out the door of Japan’s Funai Electric will get the job done for whoever still has videocassettes to play. The same can’t be said about online surveys. That method is broken – as GreenBook’s most recent GRIT report about the state of market research made plain while sounding a loud, clear call for innovation. Panel quality is disintegrating – and data quality and efficiency are disintegrating along with it. The potential panelists are looking at their smartphones instead of computer screens. That's where they prefer to take in their world, and respond to it -- including taking surveys. 

Once you recognize the problem, the solution speaks for itself: find a way to make surveys work on smartphones.

Some say there is no good way – which, if true, means market research will wither and die. But in MFour’s experience – and that of its million-member all-mobile panel and the clients who benefit from the data they provide – life has just begun. The state of the art in mobile delivers so much more than online research ever could – GPS-enabled geolocation, for starters.

Soon there will be no choice between online and mobile – just as there’s no longer a choice between the VCR and its much-superior successors. Online’s destruction isn’t coming – it’s at hand. And that’s the most creative thing that could happen to market research.

See below for more information – including explanations why some supposedly mobile methods are badly compromised, rightly-distrusted, and mustn't be allowed to define what properly-designed all-mobile research can achieve. MFour executives recently have contributed these three essays to leading market research publications. We hope you'll find them illuminating. 

Mobile has advanced beyond the online survey approach

GRIT Says Panel Woes Are Jeopardizing MR’s Future. There’s An Answer.

The World Has Moved to Mobile. Will Market Research Ever Get in Step?

With its ongoing expansion continuing apace, MFour Mobile Research, Inc., announces the hiring of Aaron Siefker and Lily Ingrassia. Siefker, a solutions executive, will reach out to inform prospective new clients about the advantages of MFour’s all-mobile surveys, and Ingrassia, an account executive, will make sure clients get top service and results when they field research projects with MFour.

Aaron turned his passion for soccer – he was a midfielder at Azusa Pacific University – into an entrepreneurial endeavor by founding GOALSHOT, a designer of soccer-training equipment that’s licensed internationally. Now he’ll help MFour score new clients and realize its goal of defining and dominating mobile research. Aaron earned two degrees at Azusa Pacific, a bachelor’s in political science and a master’s in education.

Lily has a sports industry background, too – she’s worked in marketing for the International Surfing Assn., and also for IMAX Corporation in Santa Monica. She is finishing her coursework as a senior in marketing and international business at the University of San Diego.

Aaron and Lily are part of a hiring wave that will double MFour’s staff to more than a hundred by early next year.

Alex Colao (L) and Scott Worthge of MFour Mobile Research

Trouble's afoot in the world of market research – witness the title of the CASRO Technology and Innovation Event, Monday and Tuesday in New York City: “The Engagement Crisis.”

The discussion will focus on what CASRO organizers have called a “disturbing trend” -- “As survey participation rates plummet to alarming levels, we need to stop talking around the problem and address it head on.”

MFour Mobile Research’s two-man delegation will show conferees that there’s an effective solution to that problem: all-mobile surveys fielded with the industry’s first and most advanced smartphone survey app, Surveys on the Go®.

Look for these two friendly faces at CASRO: senior solutions executives Alex Colao and Scott Worthge.

Our men in New York will detail how MFour does more than any other mobile option. Our proprietary survey technology, native app and million-member, all-mobile panel combine to create just the dynamic the industry is looking for: an engaged, demographically representative sample of consumers who provide data that’s a fast, accurate and reliable indicator for clients with important business decisions to make.

 “We’ve got Millennials,” is a refrain that conferees are sure to hear a lot from Alex and Scott. Not to mention Hispanics and any other group a study requires.

“The industry finally has realized, `this problem is so severe, we have to  have a conference about it,’” said Scott, a very busy man who teaches market research courses at UC Berkeley and Michigan State University when not evangelizing about all-mobile research for MFour.

“You’ll hear a lot of people at the conference trying to find a solution. We’ve already got a solution.”

So look ‘em up – Alex and Scott will tell you how the beginning of a beautiful friendship with MFour can be the beginning of the end of your research sample woes.