The Market Research in the Mobile World conference took place in Amsterdam last week; it was an agenda-packed and insightful event that solidified the industry’s commitment to expanding both the opportunities and the capabilities of mobile market research on a global scale.

Kinesis’ Leslie Townsend and Tariq Mirza delivered a session “Glocalizing” Mobile Research in the European Region which compared mobile survey traffic, device usage, completion rates, and other metrics between Europe and the U.S. Kinesis also conducted a survey among the conference attendees via our multimode MRMW Community to gauge researchers’ own perceptions on mobile; some results are shown below:

The majority of MRMW respondents indicated that location-based research and gamification will gain prominence in the near future, but a number of respondents indicated that it is still too soon to tell/don’t know what impact the various mobile capabilities will have on the industry. This was somewhat surprising to us, given what our own Kinesis respondent traffic looks like these days. Ms. Townsend and Mr. Mirza shared some Q1 data that revealed more than 25.5% of Kinesis’ U.S. survey traffic is now mobile, and that mobile-intended surveys completed on mobile devices have an impressive 59.7% completion rate in the European region. From our data, mobile is gaining ground in all areas of market research, and at a faster rate than ever before.

More information from their MRMW session, and additional findings from Kinesis’ latest data, will be shared in an upcoming Kinesis whitepaper – be on the lookout for it next month. Our team will also be present at the MRMW U.S. event being held July 18-19 in Cincinnati; we look forward to continuing the conversation then.

Today is the Main Stage segment of the second annual NewMR Virtual Festival, and many highly insightful sessions on various market research topics have occurred thus far. Since Kinesis recently introduced our new multi-mode online community solution, the presentations on this topic were of particular interest to us, and these sessions did not disappoint.

Due to a slight schedule shake up, Diane Hessan of Communispace presented “Online Communities: Mistakes, Misuses and Challenges” back-to-back with Felix Koch of Promise Communities, who presented “What’s Next? Five Predictions About the Future of Online Co-Creation.” This proved to be an ideal change because the two presentations offered a lot of synergy regarding how successful research communities operate today, and how they should evolve over the next few years.

During her presentation, Hessan shared some community best practice recommendations, as honed by Communispace’s extensive experience in running online communities for its clients. Some of her key takeaways were:

• Bigger is not always better – an ideal community size is 300-500 members, because as the number of members goes up, participation rates go down
• Communities should never be used simply as a means of delivering surveys – engagement is better sustained with multiple activities (an ideal split would be one third surveys / one third discussions / one third “other” activities)
• Researchers must remain focused on real listening instead of trying to create brand advocates – members want to feel invited to share their true opinions rather than be coerced into adopting ours, and they can always tell the difference (this argument could certainly apply beyond online communities to all research activities)

Next up, Koch offered his five predictions as to how online co-creation, which often occurs via research and social media communities, will change in the near future. He said co-creation will become more:

• Mobile – communities will have to support mobile interaction due to the escalation of mobile device use
• Engaging – competition for people’s online time will only get tougher and therefore communities must ensure they can attract and sustain attention
• Rewarding – as more participants become digitally literate and aware of the value they contribute, new incentive models will be constructed
• Playful – social games appeal to the online masses and are not limited to “gamers” anymore, therefore research gamification will continue to escalate
• Hybrid – communities will begin to combine both online and offline methods of communication to further enhance co-creation

The vast majority of the content from these two presentations aligns with Kinesis’ views as to the present and future of online research communities, and validates the future-proof functionality we built have into our new Kinesis Community™ solution. While market research online communities should not be utilized for all types of research, they do spur co-creation and provide insights that other research mediums cannot. Healthy and thriving communities are sustained by utilizing a community platform that is device-flexible, engaging, and highly advanced.

 
Peter Harrison of BrainJuicer UK presented “The Researchification of Games” at ESOMAR 3D today. BrainJuicer believes that incorporating gaming into market research may solve the most basic crisis of our industry …the fact that we ask research participants (via surveys and communities) to answer questions in a purely theoretical context, while people’s basic, everyday decisions are made largely based upon emotion.  Harrison asked a troublesome question:  does current theoretical-based research have any value?  The value, he said, that gamification brings to the research equation is its ability to generate emotion (or at least a certain amount of it) by creating win/lose scenarios.  This line of reasoning challenges a longstanding tenet of market research – that the context of data collection should be as neutral as possible.

The argument has strong merit, but gamification has its own consequences as well, and this point was addressed in another ESOMAR 3D presentation, “How Far Is Too Far” by element54’s Bernie Malinoff.   Malinoff reported that the introduction of gaming scenarios, and Flash, significantly lengthens the time that it takes a respondent to complete a survey – and many in the industry feel that surveys are already too long. It also introduces new forms of data bias, including forms that we are not even aware of yet, because of rapid technology change. When table grids are replaced with sliders, results will not benchmark. Gamification requires great creativity to be successful, but it doesn’t scale, and Malinoff argues for efficiency and scalability in research design.

Ultimately, research projects have always come down to costs and timing.  “Out of the box” programming is not truly possible in gamification, and therefore gamification is going to require a new resource set in the industry – one which will result lengthier programming time and increased costs, because all programming will be customized. But if the gamified surveys are sufficiently interesting, the participants may become voluntary (although this implies non-representative).  If gamification becomes a mainstream market research methodology, the research experience – both for participants and for researchers – will be very different than it is today.

ESOMAR Congress 2011 took place last week in Amsterdam, and as usual, it did not disappoint in providing thought-provoking sessions. Some very interesting and entertaining presentations were given on new and emerging research techniques – most notably gamification and behavioral economics – and the overall tone of the event was one of renewed creativity.

Whereas a majority of the U.S. industry conferences this year continued to place a heavy emphasis on mobile and social media research implementation, Congress aimed to put these topics into wider context. Assuming the conference sessions are reflective of a broader sentiment in the region, European researchers are less concerned with the effectiveness of the various platforms utilized to facilitate research, and now are more interested in the expanding the methodologies employed to translate data into insight.

Deborah Sleep of Engage Research and Jon Puleston of GMI (whose paper The Game Experiments won the award for best methodological paper) presented data that their “gamified” surveys resulted not only in increased response rates, but also in an increased level of detail for individual question responses. Stephen Phillips and Abigail Hill of Spring Research (who won the award for Best Paper Overall with Research in a World of Irrational Expectations) offered a highly engaging presentation on behavioral economics and stated that too often researchers construct models based on our own expectations of the results, and thus force respondents to answer questions within the constraints that we created. Behavioral economics, they shared, instead starts with the data and then experiments with various models to see which most accurately reflect consumer behavior – resulting in more accurate insights.

Obviously both of these topics are relatively new for the market research industry, and much more education is needed to define what gamification and behavioral economics truly are and are not, as well as how to apply them. But the Congress presentations – and the dialogues that they inspired – clearly illuminate that there are always new methodologies for researchers to discover and utilize in the quest for insight and impact. Let’s see where we head next…