Why Consumer Is King: Moving With Our Mobile Market
By Ben Leet
Texting on the Tube (Photo credit: Annie Mole)
It is the summer of 2012. As I sit on a busy train during my morning commute, fellow passengers are glued to their mobile devices – almost all smartphones. Most people are not talking on these phones. They are pinching and scrolling, browsing and thumbing. They are streaming information as fast as it’s released- a visual sign of the future of human behaviour. In fact, scrap “future” – it’s here, right now, and is only expected to proliferate. So I wonder why we continue to question whether our industry should adopt mobile research as a core methodology?
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Morgan Stanley predicts that the number of searches done on mobile handsets will overtake those done by PC in the next year. Others posture that the mobile internet will overtake desktop internet usage within three years. Alarming though this sounds, it’s a real environment for the consumer – they, we, have the internet in our pockets 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. Why would we open up a PC or notebook to do our browsing, surfing, buying, networking, organising when we can do it with just a few clicks without moving from our chairs?
So what does this all mean for the MR industry?
As researchers, we have to understand this shift in behaviour, and see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. Our survey respondents haven’t changed, but the way that they use technology has. If we as an industry are not able to keep up, then we risk losing our most prized yet undervalued asset – our consumers, respondents, the people who regularly provide the feedback we need to do our jobs and sell our products.
Of course, I’m not suggesting we try to cram a 30 minute online survey into a mobile device. That just won’t work. But what we can do is make use of this new behaviour to devise new methodologies that can be sold to our client base and generate additional revenues for the MR industry as a whole.
One potential innovation is geo-targeting: the only other methodology that can successfully create a geo-targeted survey is a face-to-face researcher and clipboard, which is expensive and not particularly twenty-first century. Instead, why can’t we push a survey to respondents that’s relevant to the particular location they are standing in? Consumers could elect whether or not they wanted to participate, would be paid an incentive if they chose to respond. As a result of technology, the data is also likely to be of higher quality because people have actively chosen to participate rather than having to be coerced at the store exit. The power is in the hands of the participants that we value.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page
