More Mobile Conference

Back for another day at the Mobile Research Conference. The buzz around the coffee room while we were waiting to start seems to be that some good ideas were tossed around yesterday but no clear themes. There is a hope that today things will crystallize a bit more. One has a right to expect that in thematically organized conferences like this one.

First up is Guy Rolfe from Kantar whose topic is the future of mobile, well, near term future since his title only tries to look two years out. He quickly shows a chart showing that mobile phone has been the fastest growing consumer technology ever. Our obvious challenge as researchers is how to leverage it. One obvious advantage of mobile is that it allows people to do what they want to do wherever and whenever they want. Including surveys. So he sees researchers leveraging mobile in the context of multi-device, mixed-mode, etc We look at the device and optimize the survey accordingly. But to realize the potential advantages we will need to be a lot smarter in moving surveys to mobile than we were in moving from mail or phone to the Web. It is a very special platform. Limited in some ways by screen size and access speed, but also unlimited in terms of possibilities for video, interaction, GPS, etc.

He’s linked the future success of mobile marketing and mobile research to changing attitudes about privacy. Key here seems to be accepting the dubious hypothesis that privacy is being redefined, mostly it seems by teenagers on FaceBook. Based on dinner conversation about the challenges European researchers are facing around privacy with the European Commissioner, well, I guess she’s not on FaceBook.

All in all a sort of kick off rah-rah of general propositions but not much detail to chew on.

Next up are a researcher/client team from Coke, although the case study is about Schweppes. (Presenters are Linda Neville and Heval Ceylan.) They have an interesting study that tries to understand how consumers interact with their brand—all of the touchpoints, channels, reactions, etc. Historically they have a whole lot of different but unconnected methods for measuring various aspects of this but no clear way to put it all together and understand what it means. And so they are using a methodology they call “TROI” which is real time gathering of feedback both quant and qual as people interact with the brand. In this case, Schweppes. The research attempts to connect with respondents every time they interact with the brand. They start with a Web survey to get baseline stuff and also set people up for the mobile tracking to follow. At the mobile stage respondents send a text each time they encounter a product under the general Schweppes brand over a one week period. (I’m a little confused here, because it seems that sometimes they send a priming text with embedded questions and other times the respondent initiates the text.) They report where they encountered the brand and whether it made them more likely or less likely to purchase it next time. It might be in a store, on a highway, in conversation, wherever. They can even upload pictures of displays or ads and describe their reactions to them. In the end they have a very rich diary for each respondent. Not being a qual guy these kinds of data always look rather messy to me but I know good qual people who can take this sort of thing and tell a very compelling story with insights that clients appreciate. They are proving it with some cool graphics that convey clear messages.

When it’s all said and done this looks to me like typical diary research but a major upgrade from the usual method. This is a good application of mobile. One key question form the Q&A: what about incentives? Sounds like, among other things, they pay by the pound, I mean text, which should help to create lots of content!

Now we are going to hear from Christian Franzen from Mindshare. His research is using mobile to get insights into what kids do all day. The research involves giving a sample of kids a deactivated smartphone. The kids had it for 72 hours and every 30 minutes they were prompted to fill in a questionnaire. Data then were transmitted after each survey is complete. Lots of effort to make the questionnaire terminally cute with an audio portion, little smiley faces for scales and all that sort of thing. Sometimes they asked the kids to take pictures of something and lots of kids did. He is reporting just a few results most of which are focused on what the parents were doing as reported by the kids. And so the face validity: shopping mom’s tend to be in shoe stores and shopping dads in electronic stores! They also find that kids have more spare time than a lot of people thing, that is, time not spent in school, eating, doing chores, etc. What do they mostly do with their spare time: TV!

These last two presentations have been encouraging in that they demonstrate both interesting uses of the technology and some results that probably provide some insight to clients. Of course, it’s hard to evaluate these results in the larger context of reliability or validity but I am prepared to give them a free pass on that given the creativity. But not for long. Especially if he keeps talking about “unprecedented insights!” And just in case we missed it, the guy running the overall program reminds us that both of these studies are about collecting data “in the moment.”