Five Ways We're Surfing the Mobile Wave to Deepen Insights

The United States has 3% more active mobile subscriptions than population size. 60% of Americans use a mobile device to access the internet for close to 2.5 hours a day. 94% of American smartphone users are searching for local, contextual, information via their smartphone and 77% of them are looking up product information on the go. The dots do connect, with 46% of all US smartphone users having made a purchase on their device.

And Canadians exhibit very similar patterns, with 58% of the population using their mobile device to access the internet, spending a little under 2 hours online each day on their device. 89% are searching for local information on their phone, while 77% of them are researching products on their smartphone while on the go.

No doubt consumer habits are changing. Context, now more than ever, is becoming king.

What does this mean for research?

The ubiquity of mobile devices has reached the point needed for them to be leveraged in scalable ways to answer critical research questions. And this can be done in ways never before possible. Mobile brings researchers closer to the consumers and expands their toolkits to technologies that enable increasingly granular perspectives into consumption habits.

At Ipsos, we are taking advantage of this established trend to conduct more relevant research that is faster, shorter and smarter. We engage people in real-time and adapt our research to real-life habits, at the right times, and at the locations where it matters most.

How does mobile change research then?

Continuous access to respondents--at home, on the go, in the store, at times and locations relevant to the research questions to be answered--allows for more natural responses, in respondents' own words, at the time and place they buy, see, experience and interact with brands around them.

They can participate when prompted or participate on impulse to capture their true emotional reactions. They are very willing to offer their opinions. But they are ever more likely to do so in their own words and context. At their choice of time. In their chosen environment.

Putting it all together

Technology can now be built into research infrastructure seamlessly, allowing for scalable interactions with consumers' devices. One such technology is Geolocation, or the ability to track and interact with mobile devices based on their location, and even more, to track and interact with thousands of consumer relevant locations at the same time, in real time. Locations are selected and `geo-fenced', a virtual perimeter established around latitude and longitude co-ordinates. Surveys can then be triggered and delivered to any person who enters or exits the geo-fenced areas, at any time. Different surveys can even be triggered for different location types--primary or competitor establishments alike.

Having conducted over 300 mobile projects, in over 40 countries, interviewing over 200,000 consumers, we have learned how to master the power of Geolocation in new ways of understanding the increasingly mobile consumer. Here are five of them.

1. Understanding consumer habits on the go. One of our clients sought to understand how people pay for goods and services when traveling, and why they choose the payment methods they do. Specifically, they wanted to understand the effect of time and location on the choice of payment.

Ipsos respondents were invited to share information related to payment methods by answering questions, taking photos and tagging their locations through their smartphones in order to capture their mood, environment and behavior at the point of their purchase experience while traveling.

To uncover purchase preferences `in the moment', credit card holders used a weekend-long mobile diary to record information around their choice of payment method each time they made a purchase. A UK diary focused on those using or open to using mobile payment methods. A US diary targeted travelers and looked to observe their payment habits on the go. In both cases, consumers not only answered survey questions, but shared photos and their location in order to capture their mood, environment and behavior at the point of their purchase experience. Results were then plotted on a map to trace specific moments of consumers' journey, allowing for a more insightful understanding of the emotions that drove specific actions along the way.

2. Understanding trade areas and path to purchase. Ipsos conducted a customer satisfaction survey that enabled our client to take advantage of mobile mapping capabilities to improve the accuracy of their trade area surveys. A short survey conducted via tablet by interviewers inside a restaurant, combined with Google maps functionality, helped us register the place of origin and destination by capturing the GPS coordinates for the starting points of the customers' journey.

The survey focused on understanding the trading area of each location by understanding each consumer's path to the store--and their subsequent journey.

3. Understanding event sponsorship impact on brands. A key sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics wanted to get a better understanding of the performance of their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch relay. By combining three methods to allow the client to evaluate who was exposed to the Olympic Relay Event (Big Data), the impact on brand awareness (mobile survey) and qualitative evaluation (mobile diary), we were able to create a 360 degree view of their campaign.

To provide rich in-depth research, we used a mobile diary covering a sample of consumers at four locations along the Torch Route. We recorded their location during the day and asked questions about their awareness of and response to the brand sponsorship and asked them to record photos and videos.

The diary also helped our client evaluate the longer term impact of the Sponsorship by asking delayed questions around the brand a week after each individual event.

4. Understanding in-store awareness. The purpose of this study was to gather insights on the purchase process of a range of luxury cosmetics using a smart-phone application.

Consumers were asked to go on a shopping trip to a specific store. They were instructed to go to the store and asked to activate the application as soon as they were in front of the store. When activated in front of the store, the application checked the exact location of the respondent through GPS.

The research focused on the visibility and positioning of the products and gave the client key insight into which brands stood out the most and how they were being positioned within the store environment. Capturing GPS coordinates also proved to be successful in validating the respondents' journey to the store itself in a simple, nonintrusive way.

5. Understanding effectiveness of in-store communication. Our client needed a tool to measure the effectiveness of in-store communication during a recently launched campaign. They wanted to focus on exploring the consumers' feelings about the store during the campaign and to find out whether the campaign broke-through and drove sales and loyalty. This multi-country study allowed for real-time onsite feedback. By using the Ipsos Mobile smartphone app, customers uploaded images and locations, answered questions whether online or offline and provided a level of detail and contextual information that would have been difficult to get by means of traditional research methods. The client was able to pin-point key drivers where the shop visit had a positive effect on purchase intent and learned which areas to focus on to improve the brand image. And they were able to quantify the importance of specific touch points such as displays or windows and in-store communication.

Where will all this evolve?

These are just five context-relevant ways we have helped to enrich consumer understanding using the latest in mobile technology. At Ipsos, we believe firmly mobile is the vanguard of getting closer to the minds of consumers. It is a wave that's constantly rising, and we have mastered the art of surfing it efficiently, at scale and across the globe.

Technology is growing exponentially every year. As it advances, so will devices continue to decrease in size. And with this, a new current is starting to take shape around the data driven consumer, the quantified self, which we believe will see a second stage in the revolution of the digital era. We have been preparing. Let's see it happen together. Drop us a line, drop by for a coffee, we would love to show you how.