Cellphone Survey

How will mobile OS wars & smartphone demographics impact your market research?

Friday, February 11, 2011 by Joeline Cross

We reported on September 30, 2010 that Android was gaining ground on iPhone’s marketshare.

Four months later, Nielson shows us that the three major mobile operating systems (mobile OS’s) are in a three-way-tie (fig. 1). The inevitable battle for leadership can only be good for end customers, where value and features will be more readily compared before committing to a handset and platform.

FIG 1: SOURCE: NIELSEN 2010 http://mashable.com/2011/02/01/nielsen-smartphone-marketshare/

For Market Researchers this offers the hope of greater accessibility to the growing volume of people who can no longer be reached by traditional landline telephones.

The % of adults living in wireless-only households in the US in 2010 versus in 2007 (fig. 2) only enforces the need to consider adding mobile to their research toolkit.

FIG 2: SOURCE: ‘WIRELESS SUBSTITUTION: EARLY RELEASE OF ESTIMATES FROM THE NATIONAL HEALTH INTERVIEW SURVEY’, JANUARY - JUNE 2010 BY STEPHEN J. BLUMBERG, PH.D., AND JULIAN V. LUKE, DIVISION OF HEALTH INTERVIEW STATISTICS, NATIONAL CENTER FOR HEALTH STATISTICS

Nielsen has also offered some interesting information about the change in trends for the segments of the community who are actively taking up smartphones in America. As you can see from the chart below (fig. 3), uptake of smartphones was led by Asians in Q4 2009, then Hispanics purchased more smartphones, until they equalized at 45% of each demographic owning a smartphone last quarter.

FIG 3: SOURCE: ‘Among Mobile Phone Users, Hispanics, Asians are Most-Likely Smartphone Owners in the U.S.’, 1 FEBRUARY 2010, NIELSON.

And if you look at, for example, Internet penetration for Hispanics in the USA (fig. 4) you will see that the growth in internet use is greater than a non-hispanic US audience. They are proving themselves to be early adopters and market-ready for lifestyle technology solutions.

FIG 4: SOURCE: ‘HOW DOES THE U.S. HISPANIC MARKET LOOK IN 2020?’, DR NADIA ASHRATAN, ELECTRONIC RETAILER MAGAZINE, 21 JAN 2010.

You will need to continue to be relevant to this audience and reach them where they are in order to gather information about their behaviour and purchasing expectations that clients will want. But how big is the market?

Dr. Nadia Ashrafian, CEO of Electronic Media Group, said that: “The U.S. Hispanic market ranks as the third largest “Latin American economy” behind Brazil and Mexico. According to U.S. Census data, there are more Hispanics living in the United States (50 million) than the entire population of Canada at 32.5 million. [They] are like a country within a country.

U.S. Hispanic purchasing power will surge to nearly $1 trillion by 2010–nearly three times the overall national rate over the past decade. In most categories, Hispanics spend more money than the general market. The top areas are groceries, telephone services, furniture, clothing, household products, ingestibles or “wellness” products, fitness products, as well as weight-loss products and automobiles.

Hispanic advertising by U.S. companies has grown 30 percent in 2009, compared with 8.6 percent for the general market. By mid-century, 25 percent or one out of every four people in the United States will be Hispanic and will represent 25 percent of the total population.”

So if 45% of Hispanics own a smartphone and you want to reach anywhere from 5-51% of them who are otherwise unreachable, and tap into nearly 5-51% of $1 trillion then you may just want to consider some kind of mobile feedback mechanism.

The same point could be made for Asian and Pacific Islanders, or anyone else who lives in a cell-phone only household. As we see response rates for email opens decline and market penetration for smartphones rising we see opportunities with smartphones in recruitment , engagement and data quality sharply increasing.

The latest on mobile market share - coverage & reach

Monday, October 19, 2009 by Sean Conry

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.

Links of the week

Friday, August 21, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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.

Is the future of research directly related to the past?

Sunday, August 2, 2009 by Mark Cameron

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...

Summing up the cell-only problem for market research

Thursday, July 16, 2009 by Sean Conry

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.

Mobile engagement - Get ready for the next wave

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Sean Conry

According to Marketing VOX, mobile marketing is set to explode, with a forecasted 26% increase this year.

The article predicts that local mobile advertising will be the next hot trend - particularly when it comes to mobile search. This info comes from BIA's The Kelsey Group.

This is no wonder. In Canada, Eight per cent of Canadian households have cellphones but no land line. The number jumps to jumps to 34.4 per cent when looking at households composed solely of 19- to 34-year-olds! In the US, it seems that across all age brackets, 1 in 5 households have cut the cable.

This is a tide that no one can fight. To not be making plans for mobile engagement is to miss out on the next evolution of engagement.

It's important to note, though, that growth in engaging with mobile advertising is coming mostly from Smartphone users (which comprise only about 5% of the global mobile market today).

So while most marketers are focused on advertising, I wonder: who is really focusing on engagement? Market insight will not be delivered entirely through analyzing click through rates on mobile ads. We will need to engage people, and find ways to encourage them to provide feedback and ideas in a time and place that suits them - this is the promise of the mobile device survey and mobile market research.

Why conduct landline-only surveys when 1 in 5 households are cellphone-only?

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

I ran across this article recently that highlights the results of a report that the Center for Disease Control put out on wireless substitution (aka canceling your land line for a cellphone).

There were some very interesting results:

Over one in five U.S. households (20.2%) are cellphone-only, an increase of 2.7% over six months ago.
One in every seven homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.
More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

This information is certainly handy to market researchers as it helps them figure out the best groups of people to use mobile marketing surveys on rather than other survey methods.

But then I began to wonder, why would the CDC need to do such an in-depth study on mobile phone usage? Shouldn't they be focusing on health-related data collection?

Well, it turns out that most major survey research organizations, including the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Therefore, the inability to reach households with only wireless telephones has potential implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research conducted using random-digit-dial telephone surveys.

So, to combat this problem, the CDC conducts in-person surveys to collect information on health-related issues. During this interview they also take the opportunity to collect information on household telephones: is your family wireless-only or landline. This information is released via the report above twice a year.

I think it is great that the CDC is aware of this problem, but why keep conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys if you've already proven with your own study (not to mention all the other mobile phone vs. landline statistics that are out there) that you will get biased results?

Seems pretty obvious here that the best answer for the CDC, as well as the other major survey research organizations, is to switch to mobile data collection.

Mobile phones a necessity, even in a down economy

Friday, May 15, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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.

Just how bad (or good) is the mobile web?

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 by Sean Conry

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.

The wild west of mobile devices and the cellphone survey landscape

Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Sean Conry

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...

Cellphone Survey for Mobile Market Research on Respondent Devices - Is it viable?

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by Sean Conry

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.

Mobile research is coming into its own

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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?

Are text messages the future of survey research abuse?

Friday, March 27, 2009 by Sean Conry

Survey research abuse has been going on for a while. The MRA even offers definitions for SUGGING & FRUGGING (selling or fundraising under the guide of research). I've heard MUGGING for Marketing posing as survey questionnaires.

As we start thinking more about mobile market research, are we going to have to coin TUGGING for shady text messages? I couldn’t possibly keep a straight face.

Whatever it's called, every time the brightest minds in survey research find a new way to conduct timely market feedback (and yes, in this case I mean mobile phone surveys), mass marketers seem to find a way to blur the lines in the consumer’s mind between marketing and legitimate survey research.

As if researchers didn’t have enough to worry about with the number of cell-only households skyrocketing.

Consumer groups are already reacting to so-called “premium” text messages. Why the outrage? To borrow a paragraph directly from this news article:

Customers complained that they were charged $16 to $35 a month — up to $200 to $300 in total — for premium text messages even though they:
• Don't remember signing up for them or
• Weren't clearly told they would cost them a certain amount per message — typically $2, but ranging from 50 cents to $5 or
• Were unable to stop the messages from being sent to them.

I’d be mad, too. But perhaps the worst part is how research once again is getting lumped in with other marketing - “Such messages usually include quizzes, surveys, contests, jokes, horoscopes, sports scores and other content…”

Does it bother anyone else that we’re being lumped in with jokes and horoscopes?

On the flip side of the consumer abuse story, the Canadian National Do Not Call list (which excludes marketing research among some other organizations), seems to be working.

Clearly, the implication for researchers is to continue holding ourselves to the highest standards when we conduct survey research, especially as we move in to using more mobile survey software. For now that probably means only contacting people who have opted-in, and even more importantly, making it easy for them to opt out.