How to Conduct Market Research on Mobile

Northstar Samantha Bond croppedSamantha Bond, research executive at Northstar Research Partners, looks as the issues around conducting ethnographic research on mobile devices, and how to overcome them. 

Mobile has tremendous potential as a market research tool, and it’s not difficult to see why. Thanks to the explosion of mobile device ownership in recent years – 72 per cent of people in the UK now own a smartphone, according to Deloitte – this channel offers brands and marketers a unique opportunity to interact with consumers.

Market research via mobile can reach participants in their natural environment and capture their in-the-moment responses. This suggests that mobile research could be a commercially viable alternative to conventional ethnographic methodologies (in which researchers need to invest considerable time and resources in observing target consumers in their natural environment).

What’s more, mobile research can help to overcome the challenge of engaging with increasingly busy consumers, as it can blend into participants’ day-to-day activities.
But if mobile research has so many potential advantages, why has it not yet been widely adopted?

The reality is that agencies and clients are still getting to grips with mobile, and many are uncertain as to the practical considerations of using mobile devices within the market research process. With this in mind, we designed a pilot study to explore how brands, marketers and researchers can make the most of mobile research.

Personality looms large
Our pilot study looked at three diverse groups of consumers: ‘fashionistas’, luxury car owners and mothers. We worked with CrowdLab to create a tailored mobile app for each group, and recruited a mix of participants in terms of gender, age and levels of technical knowledge.

Over the course of five days, we asked everyone to complete three activities: an introduction to their world, a diary task and a mission. We then interviewed each participant about their experience of the study.

When analysing the videos, audio files and other material submitted by participants during the study, we observed that the quality of insight varied significantly. From speaking to respondents, there appeared to be a correlation between the quality of responses and how comfortable the individual felt with the process of self-reporting their thoughts and feelings in real time, via a range of digital media. Thus, mobile was found to magnify the impact of personality on market research – with some personality types being far more likely than others to embrace the self-reporting process and offer insight-rich responses. In light of this, we believe personality type must be considered when designing a mobile research project.

Self-censorship inhibits real-time self-reporting
Our study revealed that the more outgoing the consumer, the more likely they are to enjoy mobile research and provide rich, visual, emotive insight. Extroverts appear comfortable reporting their thoughts and feelings via video and audio; their dynamic, engaging responses truly offering researchers a window into their world.

By contrast, more reserved consumers struggled to provide spontaneous, real-time feedback. Introverted participants in our study often re-recorded their video and audio footage, and lost their original data by attempting to go back and change their answers. As a result, their responses tended to be self-censored and not in-the-moment – particularly when opinion rather than factual information was required – and included limited visual data.

They felt particularly uncomfortable with requests for real-time feedback via video. In the words of one participant: ‘I feel self-conscious recording videos, and they take ages to prepare.’ Another remarked, ‘I feel as though I’m telling all my secrets to a faceless app.’

This level of self-censorship can undermine the effectiveness of mobile research and reduce the quality of insight available to researchers. When talking to introverted participants after our study, we observed that three main issues had prevented them from fully embracing mobile research: they worried that they did not fully understand the aims of the research; they felt uncomfortable with the lack of control over the digital format in which they submitted their responses; and not being able to plan, edit or review their responses made them anxious.

With this in mind, how can brands, marketers and researchers ensure that market research conducted via mobile will engage a wide range of personality types? We believe that greater collaboration between respondents and researchers is the key.

Engaging a wide range of personality types
While extroverted participants are likely to breeze through a mobile research project and enjoy the process, less outgoing respondents will require a thorough introduction to the research process and detailed guidance and reassurance throughout. The findings of our study suggest that a collaborative approach between the researcher and the participants is necessary to improve the self-reporting ability of non-extroverted consumers, and is likely to pay dividends by greatly enhancing the quality of insight.

Another means of encouraging respondents to talk freely and openly is to offer choice in terms of the format used to submit their responses. They are more likely to provide real-time, spontaneous answers if they are able to use the reporting medium with which they are most comfortable, instead of agonizing about what to say in a format they dislike. Ideally, this freedom should extend to the device used to participate. For example, smartphones are well suited to brief, surface-level responses, whereas PCs or tablets lend themselves to the recording of more considered feedback.

New skills and new considerations
When participants are confident and comfortable about what is required of them, mobile research excels at delivering high-quality, in-the-moment, in-context insight into consumers’ lives. The quality of some of the videos submitted during our study was so impressive that we incorporated them into a client presentation, in order to bring the company in question closer to its consumers in a dynamic, compelling way.

While mobile research is unlikely to replace in-person qualitative research, it is a valuable addition to our methodology toolbox, and can be great for cherry-picking the most suitable respondents to participate in later, follow-up research.

Mobile devices are an intrinsic part of consumers’ daily lives, described by participants in our study as a ‘third arm’ or as vital as house keys. In order to unlock the considerable potential of mobile research, however, it is essential that brands, marketers and researchers encourage and support respondents’ self-reporting ability, while designing research projects with a wide range of personality types in mind.

Samantha Bond is research executive at Northstar Research Partners