New to mobile market research? Watch Clare answer the top 3 questions she hears from clients during initial meetings. The video is just 3 minutes long and you'll get the highlights in text format below as well.
Q: Clare, what do you do at On Device Research?
I am the Business Development Director. I work with clients to find out how they can make use of mobile market research and migrate existing projects over to mobile.
Q: What are the benefits of mobile market research?
In developed markets the benefits of mobile over online is that it can be really in-the-moment. We can reach people when they're out and about, get their feedback on what they're doing using their mobile phone as a diary - the ads they see, what they eat and so on.
Mobile has very short response time. If we send out survey invites via SMS then most people respond within 30 minutes.
In developing markets, such as Africa, many places in Asia, penetration of PCs and laptops is very low. Up until now face-to-face has been the best way to get samples but it's quite expensive and takes a long time.
Mobile is fast becoming a viable alternative. It's quicker, more cost effective. It might not yet be quite as representative but in a lot of the cases it can reach the people you need for your project.
Q: How representative is mobile?
About 85% of the world's population have a mobile phone. Mobile internet penetration is around 90% in developed markets. It's growing in growth markets.
At the moment we can get representative samples of 16-54-year olds by age, gender and region in developed market such as the US, UK and Europe.
In growth markets we can get representative samples of 16-35-year olds. We can get pretty representative samples of younger people but older people simply aren't using the mobile internet enough.
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Q: What are your top tips for mobile survey design?
We've done about 10 million surveys in 57 countries so we've learned quite a lot from this. This has resulted in mobile survey guidelines which essentially say that 15 questions is an optimal number on feature phones because of the small screens and slow data load times. We can stretch that to 20 on smartphones.
There are other limitations to the length of the survey or what the questions compose of. Grid questions don't work on mobile. I've never seen one that renders well or gets good data. You also don't want a long list of answer options, our recommendation is a maximum of ten.
Mobile survey design resources:
Optimal survey length on mobile
8 best practice principles for creating a successful mobile survey
