In the Moment. Perspectives on Mobile Market Research.

Edward Appleton

The past 2-3 years have seen a seemingly relentless focus on how mobile could and should play a role in market research – numerous congresses, papers, blogs have focused on the potential role of tablets, smartphones in MR, how emerging markets will simply force engagement to be mobile.

There is also a consistent theme of MR in “catch-up” mode: the world has “gone mobile”, research seems to be lagging. The facts seem to support this view. Approximately 85% of the world’s population has a mobile phone – only 27% of Market Researchers state they are using mobile in quantitative surveys, 19% in qualitative, according to a global study conducted by GRIT in Q3/ 4 2013.

Is research simply extremely cautious about something new and untested? Or is all the excitement around mobile essentially PR and marketing hype, characterised by hyperbole and unrealistic projections?

I took some time over the past few months to talk to a range of mobile market research practitioners – qual, quant, larger and smaller players – to get a better grip on what’s hype, what’s grounded in fact.

Here are some of my take outs:

•  Mobile MR is uniquely well placed to enhance our insights abilities – get us nearer, closer, encompass behavioral context better, reflect emotional responses more closely.
• It also requires us to re-think much of our legacy survey design, confront practices of lengthy surveys, grids, long lists, that are tolerated but often lead to (often unregistered) respondent disengagement.
• Mobile surveys should be short – no surprises there. More importantly: succinctness has tangible benefits – by cutting irrelevant questions, focusing on the “must-haves”, we actually heighten engagement and response quality.
• Mobile isn’t necessarily a silver bullet. It can certainly be useful in a multi-modal design, works well for a range of studies such as diaries, shopper insights, consumer decision journeys. Not everything is suited to mobile though. Capturing POS reactions, for example, sounds good for mobile, but may be difficult if respondents are focusing on paying, change, receipts, packing. A geo-triggered invitation can be deeply unnerving if done insensitively.
• In-the-moment research can yield different responses, particularly in touch-point analyses, and needs careful planning if comparison with existing data points is important.
• My key take out was that mobile really has come of age, to quote Ray Poynter. Validation is continuing apace. Add to the above that mobile is immensely affordable, penetration levels are rising globally, and the question as to why research is apparently still slow to adapt remains slightly baffling.

Mobile isn’t actually controversial – it makes eminent sense!

Maybe the real reason we as an industry are slow to adapt lies in the psychology of habitualisation and risk-aversion – mobile forces us to be more succinct, more observational, less artificially interrogational. That puts us in an awkward place when it comes to confronting our approaches to fulfilling marketing knowledge needs, which are often lengthy.

It’s important to remember that mobile and Social Media are linked at the hip, have much in common – where would Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook be without mobile? Much of the time people’s mobile conversations are contextual, visual, apparently inconsequential, have little to do with the questions marketing people wish to have answered.

Mobile could, probably will in time, force us to come to terms with a whole new way of doing market research – and we feel uncomfortable with change, with squaring up to what many leading MR companies have been calling a broken model for some time – overly direct, rational, lengthy.

So mobile could be one of two things – either an straightforward additional to the researchers toolkit, where people can upload photos, record their own behavior more easily, arguably more accurately, something that makes us feel better about our ability to get nearer “the moment”.

Or it could be something more radical – a Trojan horse, forcing change, disrupting, holding up a mirror to us as a challenged community, forcing us to look critically at our legacy methodologies, removing questions that we wish to ask but where the answers aren’t necessarily meaningful.

It would be foolish to make predictions – mobile is a rapidly moving target, and as such technology and human psychology have much in common: unpredictable, difficult to pin down, constantly shifting. However, mobile is certainly bigger than MR, it already encompass many more measurement tools than the ubiquitous “App”, and as such we are all well advised to adjust our mindset to mobile the next time we either write or respond to a RFP.

Edward Appleton is Senior Manager Consumer Insights, Coca Cola Gmbh his new book on mobile market research, In the Moment, is available in paperback, and can be ordered online at lulu.com. Feel free to contact him at eappleton90@googlemail.com