MarketTools Blog

This is a follow-up to the recent blog post Mobile Market Research: Getting Started On Your Mobile Market Research Journey, focusing on the first cornerstone of the framework for a mobile market research plan.

If you’re thinking about conducting market research via mobile, one of the topics you may have plenty of questions about is survey sample. Admittedly, having questions on most topics is somewhat of an occupational hazard of the market researcher. Nevertheless, when thinking about a new platform for engaging respondents, sample is one of the core considerations. 

Key questions for researchers considering a mobile research strategy include:

• Can we get a representative sample?
• Are respondents willing to participate in surveys on their mobile phones?
• Will they answer honestly?
• Are they who they say they are?

If these questions prompt feelings of déjà vu, it might be because these are the same questions that were asked of the industry when online research started to replace then-traditional methods of home, street, or mall intercepts using paper surveys. (Is anyone reading this old enough to remember offline research?)

With hindsight, the answer to questions on sample quality was obvious. People responding offline are just as (dis)honest as those responding online. And while the majority give true responses, a few bad apples will always distort the data unless identified and disposed of. This is why MarketTools developed TrueSample, to ensure our panelists are Real, Unique, and Engaged.

So are mobile samples representative? This depends on a number of factors, first of which is platform: while an SMS-based platform that works on any mobile device can be rolled out to a largely representative audience, the penetration of smartphones, while growing, is not quite at the point where we would expect their users to be otherwise similar in behaviour and attitudes to those using so-called “dumbphones”. It is therefore probably fair to say that in developed markets right now, a smartphone sample won’t be as representative as an online panel of the population at large. But who said you wanted a general population target? Maybe the reason you’re thinking mobile is because this is a better way to reach certain groups, e.g. early adopters or youth who are accessible via mobile.

But this will change. When MarketTools pioneered online research in 1997, 20% of Americans were online. Today that figure is over 80%. The adoption of mobile internet will be even quicker. Internet-enabled phone sales have already overtaken computer sales, and consumers who have them often spend more of their time on the information superhighway via these clever gadgets than they do via old-school PCs and laptops.

Many consumers in developing markets are skipping a technology generation and are connecting via mobile without the PC stage. This means that representative samples in these markets have never been accessible online, pushing up costs of conducting fieldwork in these markets compared to developed markets. But just as the adoption of the PC marked a paradigm shift for research in the latter, won’t the explosion of mobile phones unequivocally change the way we connect with consumers in emerging markets?

The rise of online research has come to the rescue as participation levels in offline research have declined in Western markets. In the same way, mobile is likely to succeed in engaging respondents in market research as certain demographics in particular start to drift away from computer-based surveys.