Cellphone Survey

The two main considerations in picking a mobile research methodology are capability (what kind of work am I enabled to do?) and coverage (who can I reach with that capability?). Those of us in research care so much about market share of mobile devices because it profoundly affects both elements.

We need to reach people. But it's not just any people we need - we need to reach the right people. A colleague of mine recently held a focus group and noted - "hey - there are an awful lot of artists and musicians in this group..." Did his recruiter get the mix of participants right? Maybe, but probably not (you'd think so too, if I told you the category ).

To a marketer, the more people you can reach, the more mindshare you can gain with your ads to promote revenue growth. Marketers talk about how to reach a target market with their message because they need to know they are spending their money wisely.  However, the reason researchers care about the number of people who see our "message" (say, a survey invitation), is because of our sampling frame. We need the right people to provide us with feedback in order to help solve the business problem at hand.

In short, researchers have to worry about it even more because the science of our analytics depends on it. Without reach, my colleague wouldn't even have had artists and musicians to talk to. 

So, it's very interesting to see what Gartner is predicting for the future of Mobile OS market share. They say Android will overtake Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS, the iPhone OS and Windows Mobile to capture 14.5% of the smartphone market within three years.

"Symbian’s market share will fall from around half of the global market to just 39%, according to Gartner. Apple will maintain its third place and Windows Mobile will stay in fourth. However, RIM’s BlackBerry OS will fall from second place to fifth,"

If you're thinking about partnering with a survey system supplier to provide cellphone survey capabilities, then make sure they have an expertise and plan in place to meet all of the different flavours of these platforms as they explode in the next two years, otherwise you may never overcome the problem of reach.

Here are some articles of interest I ran across this week:

Phone Surveys Can't Last, Says Polling Boss

We are seeing "the tail end" of the life cycle of telephone surveys.


The "Hype Cycle" of Technology

Illustrates the growth, maturity and adoption of technologies--but most of all it looks at how much hype and media coverage these topics get.

Mobile Marketing Integration

An integrated marketing campaign is very important--mobile marketing can not only help with integration, but also enhance the impact of any marketing campaign.

I've found myself pondering the effect of mobile technology on the future of research, and figured it warranted a blog post.  I've been involved with both handheld surveys and wireless technology for most of my career, and throughout that time I've been amazed at both how quickly and how slowly things change.

Mobile technology itself moves incredibly quickly, but adoption of technology can range from lightning fast to incredibly slow. Market research professionals are analytical and pragmatic by nature, so it is understandable that researchers have been slower to embrace new technology than many other industries. Ironically, market research is often a key driver for decisions which drive technological advances, yet it can take years for those advances to be reflected back into the research process itself.  

Methodology is central to any decision relating to survey research methods.  When new techniques are introduced to "improve" tried-and-true processes, it is important for researchers to understand all of the implications of the potential change before implementing it en masse.  So research about research, or more specifically about new techniques for conducting research, is very important. But this is easier said than done, as most researchers are so busy generating revenue through existing methods that they lack time to explore new ones.  The academic community breaks a lot of ground in this regard, but it takes time for academic research to reach--and to be embraced by--the commercial market research sector.

Recently I have seen mobile research being embraced as a reasonably mainstream approach for survey data collection.  It is still "leading edge", but it is no longer "bleeding edge" -- at least for face-to-face interviews and diary studies.  While the application of mobile survey software is still a niche play today, we are about to see it extend beyond its traditional application to touch every other aspect of survey research -- including web surveys, phone surveys, mystery shopping and other methods.

What intrigues me more than anything is where this bottom-up thinking will really lead the research industry. While we are busy planning for the evolution of survey research to involve mobile technology, I believe it is equally important to see things from the top-down: i.e. to realize that researchers are losing control of people's attention, and consumers are increasingly recognizing the value of their opinions.  Will the methodologies of today be effective in the future, or do we need to reshape our thinking to embrace emerging realities?

I believe the future of mobile survey research looks a lot different than the past.  We will not simply see old methods enhanced by new technology; entirely new methods will emerge around the cultural phenomena that shape our societies around the globe. There is no limit to the opportunities that will be enabled by social networking and location-aware technology, which will be bundled into mobile technology that will make today's most impressive devices seem as archaic as early PCs appear today.

Those of us who wrap our arms around the cultural changes that emerge as a result of new technology, rather than just trying to shape new technology to meet old and tired methods, will realize amazing new opportunities for mining insight from consumer opinions. There will be many false starts and a lot of experimentation, but in a few years we will look back at the way we did things in 2009 and be amazed by how dramatically human communication -- and in turn market research -- have changed within a very short time.

I'll share some of my predictions on this blog over the coming months. Today I just wanted to get the thread started with some background thoughts...

It seems as though reseach online has recently reinvented themselves. They were always a great source for information, but they seem to be exploding with news and original content lately.

A recent article titled "Survey Geek vs. The Cord-Cutters" offers an audio interview with self-confessed 'survey geek' and blogger, Reg Baker.  There are also great links to relevant articles on the cell-only population and the affects on research. You can listen to it here:



This interview is great in my opinion, particularly in that he begins by describing the "cell-only" problem in terms of the sampling frame. He also eloquently yet concisely descsribes the issue of bias due to undercoverage, and how the target group of the research and the topic may affect results. Not to mention cost and data implications of doing a survey on mobile phone. Reg also identifies the "wireless mostly" problem. I won't replicate every point here in text, but here's a researcher who knows his stuff.

Brilliantly, he surmises (and hopes) that researchers will adapt to the problem by matching the method to the problem - execute "fit-for-purpose methodology decision", to paraphrase slightly.

But one thing stuck out to me... there's no mention of three significant and growing ways to conduct a mobile device survey, cellphone survey, mobile marketing survey (mobile research by whatever name you choose): WAP, SMS and Survey Applications.

Check out the latest numbers from CASRO. You might find it's worth getting ahead of the curve by adding other mobile techniques to your methodological tool box.

A recent survey done by Pew Research Center shows that Americans have cut back on most electronic items, due to the recession, that they used to see as necessities three years ago.

One of the only items that did not see this decline in importance is mobile phones. 49% of people see cell phones as necessary, which is the same as in 2006.


So, with mobile data usage on the rise and the necessity of mobile phones not decreasing, even during a major recession, it is clear that mobile research is a still a viable option.

People are willing to cut back on cable television, cars and household appliances, but never fear, they will still have their mobile phone with them even in this down economy.

You will be able to reach them anytime and anywhere with a mobile phone survey to get the most up-to-date market research data for your market research needs.

A recent study is claiming that mobile web browsing is 30% slower than typical online browsing.

I'd like to learn more about this study... Most desktop users (in North America, anyway) now browse with high speed Internet. But many only access the Internet at work where they have T3 speeds (learn more about T1 vs. T3 here). On the other side of the spectrum, some still use dial-up.

On the mobile side, some users have 3G, and some only browse when their HTC TyTn finds a WiFi connection.

Smartphone users are increasingly allowing their devices to be absorbed in to their daily lives. In particular, a new study shows the mobile web is popular with commuters. I'm one of those who browses on the way to work - I regularly browse mobile cbc.ca and The Onion Mobile, among other small screen friendly sites.

But The Onion recently eliminated their nice clean text only WAP site, and now forces me to download images. I could set my browser not to download images, but other mobile sites are more sparing with their use of jpgs, and I prefer that because like all consumers, I'm impatient but still want a good experience. I can only get through about half the content that I could before in the same amount of time, and I wonder if the flashier site is worth it.

Perhaps they are just staying ahead of the curve, but it's frustrating. And when users get frustrated, they go elsewhere.

What I'm really wondering is whether the stat is much worse than 30% for most of the population, given how bad mobile browsing is on some phones.

It just made me think about the implications for mobile market research. We need to make sure we present our mobile survey participants with fast-to-load and easy-to-navigate surveys, otherwise they're not going to participate in another cellphone survey until the wireless web catches up with the regular web for all users in every city on every phone.

I want to expand on my recent post about viability for wireless surveys on respondent devices...

People carry their mobile phone with them just about everywhere they go, and they increasingly view their mobile device as more than just a phone. The landscape is ripe for survey conducting anytime, anywhere, so why hasn't mobile market research completely blown up yet? 

If you take the cost of wireless data out of the equation, then the answer largely lies with the vast array of devices on the market.

Compare the infrastructure question to telephone surveys. Every landline phone transmits voice - it's the main purpose of your home phone. You have decisions to make regarding your CATI software, RDD and sampling strategy. And getting people to pick up and stay on the line and talk to you is a problem, but when you place that call, the phone on the other side will work no matter what brand of phone is in use.

Now move to the Internet... On the web, you have respondents choosing to interact with you through Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Chrome. Your email invitation might get filtered out as SPAM, but there's a relatively small number of permutations that your survey software has to deal with when it serves up questions and answers on a computer screen.

Executing on a cellular survey provides a completely unique challenge. The number of devices, operating systems and even capability within a company's product line are staggering. Add to this that some users might only be able or willing to respond to you by SMS, not over the web, and it becomes clear that choice in the mobile marketplace is a problem.

Corporations don't develop with the notion that compatibility with their competitor is good. In the ever-changing world of mobile devices, they just want to get the next handset out, and get it out fast. Things don't always work as you'd expect...



I wish I could link to the source, but hearsay will have to do for now. At a recent wireless summit, a prominent panelist mentioned that when Transformers the Movie came out, they wanted the accompanying wireless app to work on every mobile device. It took 20,000 versions.

So which methodology do you choose if you want to reach respondents?

Do you go with a strategy that takes advantage of the iPhone, which sold 3.8 million phones in the first quarter this year, or do you choose an application that has been customized to excel on a wide variety of devices, or do you go with SMS - something everyone can use, but limits your research options?  It's a tough choice, because your sampling strategy needs to be considered in tandem with your method of data collection.

Will the market eventually show convergence, or will mobility follow the laws of entropy? Only time will tell...  

A recent post on this blog linked to some interesting stats:

• Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent).
• 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration)

In areas like North America where traditional telephone research is a hefty percentage of the data collection that gets done, researchers might have a heart attack for the implications on their sampling plans! It's tempting to think that maybe moving to cellphone survey are just around the corner to relieve our response rate woes! 

Being at a company that specializes in wireless surveys, we're in a very exciting time. But I also have to have a dose of realism - Not all phones are created equal. 

In this story about Smartphone viruses, I learned that Smartphones currently make up about five per cent of the total mobile market, and the most popular smartphone operating system, Symbian, has 64.3 per cent of the smartphone market (3.2 per cent of the entire mobile market).

The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring with the entry of WebOs, Android and the like. But have you ever browsed the mobile web on anything other than a Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone or Blackberry? It's miserable.  My Samsung SPH-a920 is awesome - I'd recommend it to anyone, as long as you don't brwose the mobile web.

Setting aside connectivity problems for a moment, and just thinking about the hardware people own, wide acceptance of a mobile phone survey via the mobile web is probably further away than we would like to admit. Perhaps survey applications, text msg surveys and IVR will be our best options for doing a cellular survey in the short to mid term.

Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent). Compare this to only 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration).

The graph below shows this dramatic evolution unfold over the last 10 years:



In comparison, the PC industry is forecased to see its sharpest unit decline in history.

Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.

And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.

So how does this play out in market research? Well, I'd say it might be time to take a serious look at mobile data collection if you haven't already.

Mobile market research has been around for awhile now, but with the dramatic increase in mobile phone subscribers in the last few years, it is quickly becoming a permanent and important fixture in the market research industry.

A mobile phone survey or PDA survey allows you to reach people worldwide quickly and easily, and in many cases costs less than paper surveys.

Why not look into mobile survey software as a viable option for your market research?