Building the consumer story using smartphone capabilities

Editor’s note: Erik Olson is the vice president and senior qualitative research consultant at Market Strategies International, Westport, Conn. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “The smartphone revolution: four capabilities you need in your market research.”

Sometime in 2016, more than two billion people – about one-third of people on the planet – will use a smartphone. Smartphone penetration in developed countries is currently over 70 percent among adults 18-54, and the ownership gap between this group and people over 55 should become negligible by 2020. For market researchers and the clients we serve, this trend represents a profound opportunity. These gadgets have become one of the most transformative tools in our quantitative and qualitative arsenal.

Using the capabilities available to us now, we can capture information that we’ve seldom had access to. Smartphones can be used to build out the consumer story and bring attitude and usage data to life like never before.

Unlike desktop or laptop computers, which don’t know much about their users, smartphones know just about everything. Because they are always with us, they know where we are, how long we spend there, what we are interested in, what we like and don’t like, how we are feeling at the moment and even how healthy we are. Plus, smartphones allow respondents to share personal – sometimes intimate – moments as they occur. We can collect, aggregate and analyze these data to give real, deep insight into the human condition.

Smartphones enable a range of research forms never before available to us, including mobile qualitative research, asynchronous video diaries, in-the-moment micro surveys, computer-assisted telephone and personal interviews, iBeacon-triggered research, instant idea testing and passive usage metering.

As importantly, they help drive out a bias problem we’ve been fighting in market research for some time. The independent and “real time” nature of the data collection on smartphones helps eliminate confirmation, measurement and response biases. Respondents are only responsible to themselves to capture the feelings and behaviors that are occurring at that moment. It’s just them and their smartphone capturing the passive data it collects and the active data that it asks a respondent to complete. We are capturing actual attitudes and actions as they happen rather than relying on their recall or storytelling with a researcher. Now, there is nowhere to hide their behaviors.

Right now, more consumers than ever are using mobile devices to take surveys or participate in online qualitative. Despite slow and glitchy interfaces, long survey lengths, app downloads and poor graphics, between 30-to-50 percent of all online surveys are being done with mobile devices. Mobile has quickly become the survey vehicle of choice.

Mobile surveys will soon begin to use the smartphone’s full assortment of monitors, sensors and collection tools which will allow unprecedented access to data and put pressure on research firms to collect, capture and make sense of the information we have.

Many of these capabilities do not rely on the consumer “reporting” their activity; they work passively or in the background to collect, parse and report data. Here are four types of information you can add to your market research arsenal to better understand your customers:

Smartphones are highly personal devices – users don’t share their device with others primarily because it contains information that is much too personal: posts, photos, passwords, messages and social media conversations. Don’t believe me? Just try clawing a mobile phone away from your teenager. But, it is possible to “audit” these online and in-app usage patterns to paint intimate, aggregated day-in-the-life pictures of a user segments’ attitudes, usage behaviors and usage frequencies that are useful for omnichannel audits and media planning. Couple these data with geo-tracking and tags within the metadata and we get a very clear picture of when, where and what is going on in consumers’ lives.

We also use smartphones in traditional research to communicate with respondents prior to focus groups or IDIs, deliver stimuli while the researcher is engaged in remote research activities and to collect pre-work or homework exercises.

We recently completed consumer journey work for a global FMCG brand that utilized a passive meter to collect shoppers’ mobile device usage habits. The app ran in the background of respondents’ devices for nearly eight weeks collecting data on when and where the device was being used, and precisely which apps and Web sites were visited. These data gave us a deep view of respondents’ emerging omnichannel experience and were a far more accurate measure of usage than a pen and paper diary.

We can use low-power Bluetooth (iBeacons) and near field communications devices to initiate research activities at precise moments of truth to a brand. Once the consumer journey is understood and the touchpoints are quantified and plotted, researchers have an in-the-moment map to identify attitudes, behaviors and message receptivity as it is happening, not as it lives in the respondent’s memory.

In the near future, mobile phones will unlock sophisticated accelerometer and positioning technology to allow triggering within a few feet of a point-of-sale display. They will enable triggered research tools such as virtual diaries, mobile messaging and blogging, micro-surveys and asynchronous video recordings, creating unprecedented access to consumer moments of truth, consumer journeys and customer experiences.

Cameras enable instant behavior or location capture for validation, in-the-moment commentary and the ability to explain something when words fail. More and more consumers are using the video capabilities of their devices, with Instagram being the fastest growing global social network, surpassing the growth rates of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest last year. More than half of the lucrative 18-to-29-year-old U.S. consumer segment has an active Instagram account.

There are now a variety of vendors building applications that recognize brand names or build contextual insights within posted online photo and video streams. These allow researchers to quickly analyze user sentiment, usage habits and brand appeal as we build segmentation storylines or tee off conventional research activity such as ethnographic research, brand tracking or customer satisfaction surveys.

Just a few months ago, two new video streaming apps – Periscope and Meerkat – launched on both iOS and Android operating systems. Each app literally allows respondents to broadcast their actions as they occur. The two apps are further evidence of the change occurring between text and video messaging.

This is perhaps the stealthiest use of the data available on smartphones. Metadata is constantly being collected on the device using very precise accelerometers and gyroscopes to sense motion; GPS to sense location; environmental sensors (temp, light, humidity, barometric pressure) to corroborate location; and biometric monitoring (heart rate, galvanic skin response, voice analysis, facial coding) to track health. Essentially, your smartphone always knows where it is and how you feel. With users’ permission, it’s now able to share that information with researchers.

Of course, this leads to privacy issues that we all must be mindful of as the use of smartphone telemetric reporting and recording devices grow. Smartphones are intrusive devices, and market research is designed to probe deeply into attitudes and behaviors to help brands build relationships with their consumers. There will be a clear temptation to harvest as much data as the consumer is willing to give but as long as the respondent is given the choice to opt in or opt out of the research, we are on solid, ethical ground.

The ability to record videos or images of others the respondent may engage with is another matter. But, by accepting privacy guidelines, encouraging respondents to respect the privacy of others and anonymizing the data we collect, we go a long way to protecting personal rights and security. Society is constantly evolving its definition of what are privileged and protected forms of information – a trend that shows no sign of slowing as people adapt to new technologies. Ultimately, governments may have to define what is acceptable.