Meet them where they are
Editor's note: Vardan Kirakosyan is vice president of research at research firm MFour, Irvine, Calif.Â
We’ve all felt the shift. Recent world events have impacted buying behavior. Forever. Consumers, who were already moving to mobile apps and the web for purchasing, are now buying household goods online. Nearly overnight the retail world, as we know it, changed.
As researchers, we rely on consumer behavior to help our companies make better decisions. Yet the insights we provide are only as good as the data we can collect. In today’s economy, we must meet consumers where they’re spending their time and where they’re buying.
And more and more these days, they’re on their phones. Sharing all kinds of mobile data. That data is powerful. Think about it: Using the smartphone, we have access to in-the-moment, meaningful, validated opinions from consumers. While they’re in the midst of searching, evaluating and buying.
People were concerned
Researchers have actually resisted the change. We now have the chance to fix that and mobile research will be the way we do so. In 2017, a research crisis was declared.1 People were concerned. The most common methods to collect insights weren’t working the way that they used to. Specifically, there were issues with:
door-to-door surveys: expensive, intrusive2
paper-and-pen surveys: slow and hard to review3
telephone surveys: less than 6% answer4
online surveys: only 49% of respondents were satisfied5
Enter mobile research. Today, a whopping 81% of the U.S. owns a smartphone.6 And they spend more than three hours a day on their phones. That’s an easy-to-reach, collective and representative audience.
The idea behind mobile research is to use smartphones to reach consumers. It isn’t tied down by in-person interviews, landlines or desktop computers. It moves with the people you study.Â
As an example, let’s look at a major cell phone brand that was in a tough situation. It was tracking consumers to its stores but struggling to get a complete picture of the people likely to buy its brand. Specifically, it couldn’t get an accurate sample of males, young people and Hispanic Americans using any of the four methods above.Â
Missing a majority of its target market meant a higher incidence rating and higher costs. It also meant that the company had to ask detailed questions to identify the make, model and carrier of people it could reach. Collectively, the challenges limited the accuracy of the research.
It solved the problem by switching to a mobile research tracker. Like a typical brand tracker, this research continued to follow the company’s consumers but gave it the ability to open up the panel to 81% of the U.S. population who owns a smartphone.
This meant that the brand could now access 10 million daily consumer journeys via a market research app. It was able to meet its target market needs, find out exactly what make, model and carrier participants had – without asking – and increase its incidence rating. With a mobile app, it is also tracking online and app behavior.
Do three things
You need to do three things to make mobile market research work for your projects: identify the need; pick your audience; add behavioral data. We’ll take a look at each one to get you comfortable with the platform as a whole.
Identify the need. Any good research project starts with a goal in mind. Mobile research is no different. It’s simply a weapon of choice, focused on acquiring accurate data and insights. So, you’ll start in the same way you always do, with a simple question: What is the goal of this study?
With that in mind, you can craft a compelling questionnaire alone or with a research provider. Either way, your questioning should be designed to meet that primary goal.
For example, in the wake of COVID-19, consumer spending has shifted. To understand the impact, we decided to research buying behavior. The goal was to track the purchases of essential versus non-essential items at big-box retailers.
We expected the virus to reduce non-essential spending. On the other hand, we expected food and toiletries would increase, as consumers prepared for a possible quarantine. Not wanting to rely on the questionnaire alone, we chose to leverage behavioral data as well.Â
We’ll share more about behavioral research a bit later.
Pick your audience. In mobile research, your audience lives in an app. That app is how you connect with consumers’ smartphones. When consumers download the app, they’re sent a survey, asking for their demographic data such as age, income, ethnicity, relationship status any potentially many other pieces of data.
All of their data points are stored in the app. This gives you, the researcher, flexibility to profile your ideal target audience. You choose exactly who to include as a panelist.
For the COVID-19 panel we needed men and women 18+. The app gave us 1,133 participants, split 48% male, 52% female. The primary age range was 18-44 years old. Participants were screened on knowledge of coronavirus and a retailer visit within 30 days. Stated data was collected with a 13-question survey via the Surveys On The Go app. We fielded and collected data in two hours.
Here are examples of the stated behaviors they shared. In Figures 1 and 2, percent change was used to calculate increase/decrease from February to March waves.Â
We see consumers stocking up for a quarantine, based on increased purchases of hand sanitizer (80%), household supplies (65%), nonperishable foods (49%) and face masks (35%). Generally, respondents were preparing for two to four weeks, which explains the buying shift at big-box retailers, where they can buy in bulk.
Add behavioral data. The real difference in mobile research? Behavioral data. Behavior-driven research is the ability to see what consumers do rather than rely on stated data alone. The reason it’s so important is that it eliminates fraud and recall bias in one step.7
Consumers can’t remember everything. So, if we only ask them to state their behavior and they can’t really remember what they did, it puts the entire project at risk of being inaccurate.8
Mobile research has a solution. Here, the research is being done on an app connected to GPS on the smartphone. When a consumer moves, the app knows it. And the app can now send a survey to that consumer in real-time, right as they’re walking into (or out of) a location, interacting with an app, or doing an online activity. That’s behavioral research.
Here’s an example of behavioral research with COVID-19. We tracked total visits to Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club and Costco. Each participant was geolocated through GPS using the Surveys On The Go app. A visit was defined as going a listed retailer from January 1, 2020, to March 4, 2020. Visits were tracked week over week.Â
Figure 3 shows their behavioral data. Stated and behavioral data, together, shows us a massive shift in consumer spending.
Once COVID-19 was declared a pandemic9 there was up to a 32% lift in visits to big-box retailers. When combined with the stated data, we are given a very detailed picture. Consumers are clearly preparing for a potential quarantine.Â
At the same time, in-store purchases decreased in home décor (31%) and clothes (32%). We’d expect consumers to decrease non-essential in-store spend as they focus on food and supplies, if they believe they’re about to quarantine.
What’s interesting is that we still see non-essentials being bought – consumers are just buying them online instead of in-store.
Hearing and seeing consumer behavior – in one place – is powerful. Stated surveys allow us to tap into the voice of the customer but behavioral data, delivered by mobile research, gives the credence we need to be sure our research picture is accurate.Â
Final thoughts
Market research is personal. We’re in the business of working with real people. And we need to get even more personal if we want to improve the results of our research. It’s not enough to base important business decisions on guessing who consumers are, what they want or why they want it.Â
To do that, we need to talk to real people in real-time. That’s what mobile research does. And that’s why it is forging a new union between behavioral and survey data. Mobile research brings big data, consumer journeys and survey data together.Â
It’s a single home for reaching a representative, first-party consumer panel. It’s consumer understanding based on reality. We’re excited to see our industry continue to expand, and benefit from, the latest technology.Â