Kantar's Profiles Blog

A growing percentage of respondents access surveys using their mobile devices, but most surveys are not designed to display legibly on these devices. This leads to frustration, poor data quality, survey dropout, and eventually panel attrition. Lightspeed GMI is taking a proactive approach to survey design to help ensure today’s surveys are compatible across devices. The best way to do this is to design surveys with mobile display in mind, ensuring they will render adequately on the smallest screens. Based on our extensive research on research we have identified 10 guidelines to make a survey device agnostic:

What this means for data-driven marketing
Things have changed. You only need look around you to see just how far technology has come in the past decade alone. Whether you look at the Apple product suite, Google’s role in finding your local takeaway, solving who ‘that guy’ on TV is, or the new-age wardrobe must-haves such as Fitbits or Google glass - technology is now a life-essential.

As online research has transitioned over the past 15 years from random digit dialing or door-to-door methods to online, a shift from probability to non-probability sampling has occurred. To assuage the concerns of researchers, rigorous sampling methods were developed to ensure representative samples. Despite this, however, there has been a rapid change in sampling practices as respondent efficiency became the focus of fieldwork companies and respondent routing replaced traditional sampling for much of the market research industry.

The rapid shift in survey data collection to mobile devices has caused researchers to scramble to ensure that surveys are compatible with these collection modes and that trends are not impacted. The focus of attention has been to find ways to simplify and shorten surveys so that they work reasonably well on a mobile device. What has been lost in this transition is that mobile devices offer new ways for us to provide input that may be more suitable than reading questions and typing answers.

Lightspeed FSG just released a new study on mobile banking in the U.S., based on a nationwide survey of nearly 2,500 consumers who own a smartphone or tablet. While most people realize that Millennials are the heaviest owners and users of smartphones in general, it is fascinating to discover that once the playing field is leveled to include only people who own a smartphone or tablet, Millennials are still by far the most likely group to engage with their bank or credit union using mobile banking.

Social media has come a long way since its humble beginnings. This evolution in consumer behavior is impacting the data collection process globally -- opinions are shared to an open network, unsolicited. The adoption of smartphones and tablets has happened seemingly overnight, yet the next big development could change things again in an instant. By measuring changes in user adoption and online behavior, businesses can stay on the pulse of their evolving consumers.

Rational Buying Decisions in Online Market Research

I attended the Dutch Marketing & Insights Event (MIE) on 4 -5 February 2015. The MIE is organised by the Dutch Market Research Association (MOA) and is an annual returning event. This edition again contained a lot of interesting workshops which highly contribute to the knowledge and skills of market researchers. Without a doubt, the most discussed topic at MIE was Big Data and analyse techniques for traditional market research. For this blog I want to focus on the latter topic.

American Express announced this week that it will discontinue its exclusive agreement with the Costco Wholesale Club Stores, which have traditionally accepted only American Express credit cards in its stores. Costco is likely to enter into a new partnership agreement with another U.S. card issuer.

This week, we asked panelists in the Asia Pacific region how they plan to celebrate Valentine's Day this year. In Australia, 51% of respondents said that they do not celebrate Valentine's Day, as did 42% in Korea. In other countries, such as China and Japan, panelists will be celebrating by exchanging gifts, flowers and chocolates, and/or dining out for the occasion. See the full results of our survey below.

On a monthly basis, the Cincinnati AMA Marketing Research Shared Interest Group meets to discuss industry issues, trends, techniques and methodologies. During the January 2015 meeting, we debated the group’s burning research questions.