Kantar's Profiles Blog

Our industry is at a cross roads, not for the first time. More than ten years ago, the online revolution transformed the way marketing research was conducted and allowed us to tap into a more readily available set of respondents.

Fast forward to today and a similar shift is underway with mobile. Our need to engage willing survey participants is again a driving factor. This time, however, it’s from traditional, static online to online on-the-go. This shift is arguably a lesser transformation than an offline mode moving to surveys being programmed, completed and returned through an online platform. But it is nevertheless significant.

If you study the art of film making, it will tell you that a good film script is based around one great question. This question captures your attention from the beginning; the story that naturally emerges slowly reveals the answer. The 'question' drives the entire story.

Question:  What if a nun was made to be a nanny?  Movie: The Sound of Music

Question: What if dreams and reality were inter-changeable?  Movie: The Matrix

Question: What if there's more to life than being ridiculously good looking? Movie: Zoolander

Six Months After Apple Pay Launch, How Should Banks, Retailers, and Agencies Evaluate Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Samsung

A new Lightspeed FSG study shows an uptick in frequency of Apple Pay use for in-store purchases -- but security concerns and a general lack of interest has slowed adoption of Apple Pay and other eWallet platforms.

Among current Apple Pay users, fully 17% said in the new July 2015 study they use Apple Pay more than 10 times a month for in-store purchases -- up from just 7% in November 2014.

Increasingly, global brands understand that music is a critical part of the customer experience. As PlayNetwork pointed out in “Brands, Consumers, and The Sound Between,” successful leveraging of music is its own form of currency that buys more credibility with consumers. In order for brands to cash in, they need to integrate music in ways that feel culturally relevant while still being branded. For companies trying to nail a complementary “brand sound” delivering relevant music that feels authentic is critical.

“Customers can tell whether or not your brand actually loves music or if you’re trying to force it. Music can elevate a brand in ways that copy and images just can’t, but it’s got to be real.”[i]

With summer in full tilt, the beer category is among the best positioned to leverage brand sound as part of their marketing strategy.

Last week, Uber announced that it expanded its service to better accommodate people with disabilities with the introduction of uberASSIST. As part of the service, “driver-partners are specifically trained by Open Doors Organization to assist riders into vehicles and can accommodate folding wheelchairs, walkers, and scooters.”

Research clients should learn how the source of their respondents affects research data. At Lightspeed GMI, we have been observing some very significant differences depending on the source of the data. The way a respondent enters a study will impact the overall data quality obtained from that respondent. It is not a story of good and bad, but rather just a case of significant differences; ignoring these differences could result in poor quality research.

No, actually they do.

There is a feeling that mobile surveys make open-ended questions more difficult. Mobile is used mostly as a communications device -- writing or texting is one of the main activities that we use it for. We see this behaviour every day in the streets where everyone is writing to someone on their device regardless of it being a text, an email or social media post.

People with disabilities have an annual disposable income of more than $220 billion USD - yet the vast majority of market research is not designed to include them. All too often the exclusion of people with disabilities causes companies to seek retrofitted solutions to address access barriers. The tech industry finally is waking up to the realization that there is a need and a growing demand to create apps and other technology-based solutions that go beyond solving boredom and entertainment issues for the masses to offering personalized solutions that eliminate barriers for 57 million consumers with access needs.

Rarely do U.S. government rulings impact the market research industry, but one recent change defines the future of our industry. Since 2014, several industry associations appealed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow marketing researchers the freedom to use auto-dialers to call mobile phones; however, the FCC recently implemented new regulations to expand the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) which prevents the use of robocallers on mobile phones even in the use of market research. By eliminating this outdated and increasingly costly method of data collection, the government got it right.

Marketers and brand custodians today are bombarded with buzz words by the bucket load – big data, programmatic, search, analytics, social media, mobile behavior, etc. Add to this the insights generated from the marketing research industry and it can seem like mayhem is upon them with convoluted data sources all trying to decode the complex human behavior. What is imperative for all in this crowded space is the need to generate actionable information for the brand.