When Millward Brown, one of the heavyweights of the market research world, gets on stage and announces that mobile market research beats face-to-face in accuracy then it's time to pay attention.
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Data collection speed and accuracy were the things MB's Regional Brand Manager - Tracking, Yee Mei Chan focused on two weeks ago at the Market Research in the Mobile World conference in Singapore.
Chan and our own CEO Alistair Hill co-presented Millward Brown's experience of moving brand tracking studies from face-to-face to mobile, the findings and challenges of it. All data on mobile was collected by On Device Research.
Full presentation slides are embedded below.
Data quality on mobile is impressive
A key finding from the project was that mobile research delivers more accurate correlation to actual retail brand share when compared to results from face-to-face interviews.
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This finding was consistent both in our Malaysia and India study. A perfect correlation to the actual retail brand share would be 1.
In Malaysia mobile scores 0.94 against face-to-face's 0.89 while in India it's 0.91 vs 0.83.
Data in Malaysia is based on a study of 10 deodorant brands while India data comes from a study with four top confectionery brands.
Yee Mei Chan stressed a couple of other benefits of mobile over in-person interviews:
- Better access to higher income households
- Wider geographical coverage
- No undue influences from interviewers
Screen size does not affect data consistency
The common critique of mobile methodology has been the screen size and its potential impact on data. Our research on both smartphones and feature phones in these two markets shows that ad evaluation data on mobile is consistent despite the screen size.
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The challenge of changing habits
Yee Mei and Alistair ended on key challenges for both researchers and end clients in adopting mobile approach:
Researchers think:
- Cost
- Speed
- Accuracy
End clients think:
The full conference presentation is embedded below. It was co-presented by Yee Mei Chan and our CEO Alistair Hill at the MRMW Singapore event in March, 2014. All mobile fieldwork for this study was carried out by On Device Research.
