4 Reasons To Do “In-The-Moment” Research

Surveys on mobile devices allow you to be with your customers at the moments and in the locations that matter, at home or on the go:

• While using the product
• While consuming it
• While shopping
• When entering or exiting a location.

This makes it possible to see more clearly how people perceive and interact with brand touchpoints. Here are four reasons to leverage the potential of in-the-moment research.

Human memory is not completely reliable

We did not have many viable options before, but with in-the-moment research we can help overcome the fact that human memory is flawed by all kinds of biases1 when recalling facts and actions: availability, peak-end, halo effect, attention bias, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, etc... Unless the objective of your research is to verify long term memory retention, such as is the case with communications research, in-the-moment research will be a better means to:

• Present things as they are rather than as respondents claim they are. 
• Capture volatile facts and emotions, in the moment and over.

Many decisions happen In-the-moment

In-the-moment decisions: product choices at the moment of truth, impulse purchases, media browsing, reactions to advertising…

In-the-moment research reveals information and detail about events and influences that contribute to decision making during consumers’ busy lives, but would tend to go unreported in most retrospective studies. What’s more, respondents are very willing to share these moments with us. In-the-moment pictures and videos bring context and reality

Experience shows that respondents really enjoy sharing pictures and video with us. This visual material illustrates the landscape in which your products and services live and helps us better understand consumers’ words.

• When they answer “homemade”, what does that really mean for them? 
• What better way of understanding respondent’s reality than via a video?
• In-the-moment insights gives you a competitive edge

In Product Testing, the in-the-moment portion of the research has many times provided discrimination that was not observed in the traditional recall based research, impacting the launch decision and/or allowing to improve products before market.

When to use In-the-moment research?

In-the-moment research will provide valuable insights in all occasions where you are interested in live situations, real behavior, reactions when respondents experience the need state you are targeting.

Therefore, the most obvious research candidates are:

1. Early stage Product development
2. In home Product Tests
3. Usage and Attitudes
4. Shopper research, pre-store, in-store or at exit
5. Communication research that focuses on consumer experience of the advertising
6. Reactions to live events such as media content or political debates;

How to leverage this potential?

Ipsos offers in-the-moment research through various methods that can be used alone or in combination with traditional research:

1. Ipsos survey Apps that respondents download onto their smartphones. They have the advantage of being available offline, being very easy to use and to capture pictures and videos with. They also allow geolocation, geo-tracking and geo-triggering.
2. Geo-triggering with Google Consumer Surveys: surveys triggered with GCS mobile panelists who visited selected locations in the past 48 hours.
3. SMS access: respondents get a mobile friendly survey link by SMS and enter it every time they are in that moment. Fast and broad coverage, high engagement due to Ipsos’ unique device agnostic survey design.
4. QR code recruitment: consumers spontaneously scan a QR code encountered in the moment and location of interest and are invited to an online survey.