As Chris Horton recently reported for Social
Media Today ‘The world is going mobile at an exponential rate. In
2011, Apple sold more iOS devices (156M) than the total number of Macs sold in
all 28 years of its existence (122M).
Google recently
announced that 850,000 new Android devices are activated daily and the total
number of Android devices around the globe has surpassed 300 million
It has been estimated
that there will be one billion smart mobile devices in-use globally sometime
between December 2012 and June 2013.
This rapid
proliferation of smartphones and tablets is changing how consumers make
purchase decisions and interact with brands’.
Increasingly,
purchase decisions are being made with the aid of user-generated content such
as online reviews and peer opinions found on social media and this is being
accessed at or close to the point of purchase. Indeed 48% of consumers say
their mobile is a significant influencing factor when making a purchase
decision.
This means that it is
now vital for businesses to approach marketing and research through a mobile lens. The future of online is
mobile!
Understanding the consumer in the
moment
The opportunity this presents to
harness the smartphone's ability for instant media consumption and real time
customer insights is key.
Mobile devices integrate and change
touch points. Mobile is so immersed in our lives we barely notice it.
Behaviours will change further, more and more devices will be connected our
children won’t know anything other than smart devices.
This means that mobile research offers a real benefit in
generating real time insights. Traditional ‘recall’ surveys can be
inaccurate with their reliance on human ‘memory’, but by using mobile to turn
recall surveys to immediate point of interest surveys the data can be more
reliable.
So, mobile research is actually
contextualised research allowing researchers to get a better overall view of
respondents’ natural behaviours.
IKEA customers have a higher than usual
smart phone penetration. They created the ability to capture customer unique
experiences at the time they are interacting with the brand, which was ground
breaking for IKEA. It even allowed customer issues and concerns to be addressed
before the customer even left the store!
The way consumers feel has a direct
impact on how they behave, and mobile also presents an ideal tool to harness
this, capturing the contrasts between what consumers say they do and what they
actually do!
What are the
advantages of mobile research?
It’s not just early adopters that have
online access via a phone, the new wave of mobile users means it’s increasingly
becoming mainstream.
And mobile research has numerous
advantages over traditional methods
- Immediacy - consumers record
their interaction with brands as they happen
- Timeliness – research
projects can be sent out when it is appropriate to do so with instant
access to power reporting and analysis
- Less recall issues – real
time feedback
- Shorter surveys – less
onerous for the consumer
- Contextual richness –
feedback ‘in situ'
- Better engagement with
younger target groups
- Convenience - it’s easy for
consumers to use and always there
- Better response rates - as high as 40-45%
· The opportunity to get more creative about
rewards. e.g. free gaming apps that will encourage them to participate in more
research.
Where next?
We are moving into a new era for
marketing and research – the era of the ‘Connected Customer ‘ Customers are now
connected to their own social networks, have ‘direct access’ to companies and
brands on an on-going basis and are living an ‘always online’ lifestyle.
Marketers and researchers must realise
that current methods and guidelines may not work to engage the Connected
Customer or to understand and report on such engagements.
This connectivity
means that the next step from mobile research surveys is mobile research
communities that could involve customers, stakeholders, even shareholders!
In the UK mobile is used to alleviate
boredom (39% in downtime), which presents an opportunity
for researchers to experiment with new ways of incentivising.
InSites Consulting use a gamification system
to allocate points to participants that share content to “level-up” and unlock
incentives. They also run challenges, asking members why their city is the
coolest, sparking a flood of images, video and other content.
The more content they share, the more
engaged consumers become with the platform and the more they want to share in
response.
So how can research respond to the
challenge? The cloud is everywhere and big data is an opportunity not a
challenge. The future is bleak for those with blinders on, but extremely bright
for those that can help design it!
