Growing mobile penetration in emerging markets means new opportunities for researchers.

This August saw the 20 billionth tweet. Moreover, Facebook claims that 500 million active users, of whom 150 million use mobile phones, spend 700 billion minutes every month on its social networking site.

There will be more than five billion mobile phone subscribers in 2010 according to the International Telecommunication Union. Even in markets such as India, which has the second most-populous mobile subscriber base in the world, there are over 500 million mobile subscribers with 12 to 14 million new subscribers being added every month and mobile penetration is growing at over 30% per annum in rural areas.

In a recent study, Young and Rubicam argue that the next Internet revolution will not be on computers, but on the mobile phone. Some mobiles are more powerful than computers and unlike computers which function in the ‘personal’ space, mobile phones operate in the ‘intimate’ space, accompanying people throughout the day. Mobile technology has huge potential to reach the masses in a diverse and culturally complex country like India. There are, a number of barriers to the adoption of mobile technology in the mainstream of market research, nevertheless mobile-based applications are increasingly gaining ground in collecting data for market research and other purposes in countries like India.

For the market research industry, surveys via mobiles can be cost-effective, executed in real-time, and help us to reach a target audience spread across a wider geography. Yet, adoption is currently quite limited, possibly because of cost issues and the perception by researchers that it is, as yet, too early to use this technology effectively.

In developing countries, face-to-face interviewing with a readily-available workforce is the preferred methodology, followed by CATI or online. Many researchers think that research via mobile would mean that interviewers need high-end smartphones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) to conduct fieldwork, and that this could require significant investment. Moreover, mobile phones might be ineffective if respondents need to be exposed to stimuli or when ‘open-ended’ data needs to be captured. Even the battery life of a handset might limit an interviewer to being on the road for eight hours.

Uninterrupted mobile connectivity, especially in remote and rural areas, is a constraint. Furthermore, developing an application that can work smoothly across brands and models taking into account the variety of mobile phones and multiple platforms is a huge task for mobile technology developers.

Finally, the art of designing a questionnaire is critical for mobile phone research surveys. On a small screen it’s more important to find the right words, and of course, it needs more testing to get it exactly right.

Mobile Applications

On the other hand, the rapid growth in mobile phone penetration offers marketers and researchers an opportunity to tap into this burgeoning and fast-evolving Indian community, quickly and effectively.

Marketers and researchers do recognise the importance of this medium, especially in view of the extreme media fragmentation and pressure on budgets. We cannot change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust our sails. So, is it possible to change the yardstick for considering mobile methodologies for research?

Researchers might ask, “Will research via mobile phone make paper or telephone surveys obsolete?” We think it is not a question of one versus the other, but the two modes complementing one other. Comparing telephone or online versus mobile, leads researchers down the wrong path. Any project solely based on mobile contacts may not be as efficient or effective in delivering research results, but mobile-based technology could produce better results when it supplements prevailing methodologies.

Key Aspects in Development

To test the validity of this proposition we looked at case studies from within and outside the market research industry for inspiration on how mobile technology might be deployed for data collection.

The key aspects that can expedite adoption of mobile-based research designs into our mainstream projects would be:

Digital ethnography: Collecting ethnographic data through regular interactions between respondents and researchers is already well-established. However, by requesting respondents to send texts and pictures on what they are doing and where they are at random times of the day through a mobile-based application enhances the richness and immediacy of data.

Consumer promotion management: Recently, Nokia India used a mobile application for a 'paper-less' scratch card consumer promotion. This was combined with a phone interview to capture customers’ usage and brand preferences. This helped Nokia India to improve the effectiveness of its sales promotion and collect rich information regarding consumers and retailers to improve its subsequent promotions.

Social networking on mobile: Social networking through mobile provides access to moving online focus group discussions to mobile ‘Tweet’ surveys.

Data collection

Generally, there are two ways to collect data: through the active involvement of respondents or passive data collection without the direct involvement of respondents. Most of our primary data collection (via online, paper or telephonic) tends to rely on active techniques. We think that mobile technology can bring tremendous added value to projects where it is deployed for passive data collection and where the device captures background data. Here are some examples.

Location-based services: This mobile application tracks the movement of interviewer or respondents across different parts of the city. It can be used to monitor the daily movements of your field force, or to measure the traffic patterns in a city for urban planning; to assess how well a billboard is placed to be noticed, or to undertake retail-oriented location-based projects.

Mobile usage studies: Mobile applications can be developed to create logs of all the activities or applications that people use on the mobile device, such as: sending SMSs, listening to radio, using value-added services or browsing the internet.

Trained interviewer collection: Mobile technology can be deployed where the data is collected on a mobile device by a trained interviewer instead of the respondent. The interviewer simply follows a step-by-step process to gather data, either by entering text numbers or by answering a series of questions designed to meet the specific needs of the project. The information can be collected as text, voice or video and can be sent instantly to the project office or securely stored on the mobile phone.

Mystery shopping through interactive voice response (IVR) applications: The shopper enters the target outlet, dials a preconfigured IVR phone number through the mobile phone and feeds in data following the IVR questions. When the audit is completed, the data is uploaded on a web portal for instant viewing which helps eliminate memory-led biases and can be deployed simultaneously in multi-centre multi-lingual projects very effectively.

Dynamic quota planning in face-to-face data collection: Through this mobile application, the interviewer updates key information fields when interviews are completed. This data updates the quota planning sheet dynamically and sends the updates to interviewers across the city.

The next wave

Using mobile phones for market research is a great way to experiment with what integrating technology and domain expertise can deliver, and a wider acceptance of the mobile platform by researchers will lead to further innovations.

We are seeing the start of an explosion of innovation, the applications that can be deployed on mobile phones is limited only by our imaginations. Mobile phones will enhance traditional projects whether they are online, telephone or paper surveys by adding real-time improved productivity, higher quality and greater cost-efficiencies. This will create many opportunities for industry start-ups to find new ways to provide additional services and generate revenue. Last, but not least, this will undoubtedly enrich customers’ and respondents’ experiences.

We shouldn’t be asking, “should we do research via mobile?” The real question is how should we do it.

By Sandeep Arora. Sandeep is Senior Vice President and Head of Research & Analytics at Datamatics Global Services Limited

This article was first published in the October issue of Research World published by ESOMAR. For more information go to http://www.esomar.org/index.php/research-world.html

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