The Drivers of Change Aren’t Going Away – It’s Time to Go Mobile

Looking through the results from the GRIT questionnaire, I found myself going back to the Drivers of Change section. It’s not only the results that caught my eye (though they did, but more of that later), but I’m always interested in what people in our industry feel is driving us all forward. And more importantly, what the actual impact of those drivers has been. MR is an industry with enormous potential for evolution – even disruptive evolutions – which, for a well-established, mature sector is something we should all be pretty excited about.

But I’m not sure we’re living up to the opportunities. At least, not all of them.

Here, I’m mostly talking about mobile, which tops the list of drivers for change. Hardly a huge surprise, more a confirmation of a fact that surveys like this have been telling us for some time now. But are we really making the changes we need to?

The lack of progress in the optimization of surveys for mobile has – in 2013 – been a disappointment. For several years now, the proportion of respondents opening surveys on a mobile has increased (it now stands at around 20%) but much of the MR industry has steadfastly failed to make progress in accommodating this development. This is frustrating, given the technology is there, effective and ready to use, and this inertia will only service to frustrate respondents and drive down response rates.

There are two areas to consider for those MR agencies who are adding mobile to their data collection repertoire: accidental and purposeful. Accidental, like those situations referenced above, are those respondents who’ve been sent an online survey, but who open it on a mobile device. If these people are not provided with a good survey experience (for example, thought Responsive Web Rendering), they’ll simply abandon the survey and never return to it. The resulting lack of engagement and reduced response rates simply isn’t something we, as MR practitioners, can accommodate. The technology is there to ensure that web surveys open automatically to take advantage of the native characteristics and components of the device in question so there’s no excuse not to use it.

Purposeful mobile is increasingly becoming an area that we need to consider, though in many respects there’s less urgency than there is for capturing the accidental mobile audience. However, purposeful mobile – which includes Apps that capture mobile diaries, rich media and GPS data – provides an incredible opportunity for those businesses who are prepared to get stuck in. Apps can enable respondents to provide data while offline, and lend themselves extremely well to providing extensions of other CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing) programs.

Think about mobile research as a way to converse with respondents in the way that they prefer to communicate, or in some cases, the only way in which they can be reached. From an industry that’s been dealing with declining response rates and (from some sources) threats of complete extinction – it’s a short-sighted decision to opt out of mobile entirely. And not one I’d recommend.