Mobile Research for "in-the-Moment" - How to Get nearer the Action
Lumi describes itself as “leading the way in mobile research”. A UK company, founded in Finland in 2003, it now has almost 200 employees worldwide. Familiar probably to many of the online panel providers, and some of the larger Agencies, Lumi isn’t perhaps known that well by the broader research community.
Lumi is certainly a company to watch: they have expanded internationally, are growing fast, WPP holds a small stake (5,5%) of their shares - reason enough perhaps to pay close attention. They were one of the first wave of companies to be recognised in the scheme Future Fifty, a UK Government backed programme to support technology companies with high growth potential. (http://bit.ly/1ahRPFy). They have also won recent MR industry awards - notably their joint work with Affectiva in capturing emotions through mobile devices, which won the Esomar Best Methodological Paper Award in 2012.
As a successful innovator focussed clearly on the mobile space, with a strong technology core, Lumi certainly has the ambition to shape the future of mobile.
But what about Market Research? Are they the sort of tech-company that knows everything about gadgets but pays lip service to user experience, in this case respondents? Understanding their perspective on mobile MR is a must.
I caught up with Dan Foreman, who alongside his role of President of ESOMAR is Lumi’s Chief Marketing Executive. Here’s the output of our discussion.
Mobile as a Technology Transformer - MR Just one Field
Lumi is, to quote Dan, a “provider of mobile content solutions” seeking opportunities where mobile can play a transformative role. This includes but is not limited to Market Research.
The company isn’t a Research company looking to go mobile, it is a technology company looking for relevant applications with its products and services - scalable, low-cost, flexible.
Market Research is just “one vertical” alongside meetings and events. More areas will no doubt emerge.
Lumi looks specifically in MR to leverage their white label offerings “to offer low-cost, highly flexible solutions to third parties.” A disruptive proposition.
Partnering with existing MR players is a Lumi strategy - among them Affectiva and Millward Brown to offer a mobile solution to facial scanning and emotional reaction in advertising tracking work. They have worked for a number of years with Kantar on joint development projects (http://bit.ly/19fMdgk), they have also worked on high profile projects with Ipsos.
Clearly they are not just well connected with major players, they are serious about understanding MR, and becoming a recognised player in their own right. They submit white papers on mobile to authoritative industry publications - including a piece in Admap in May 2013 entitled “Real-Time Research – Getting Closer to the Truth” . This is clearly equity building.
This strategy suggests that in future Lumi will not stand still, and will look to discover ways of capturing more value, wherever that may be in the value chain.
A Discreet DIY Focus
Whilst Lumi doesn’t go all out to stress it in its literature or online content, it is a provider of DIY mobile software. Lumi describes itself in one section in its website as “a leading self-service mobile survey tool .“
In a list of customers published on their website - likely not exhaustive - they name more research Agencies than end-clients. Nevertheless, end-clients are there: including EMI, BMI, ebay and abc.
The disruptive potential through disintermediation is clear: by approaching Lumi directly, end-clients can take greater control over their survey, increase flexibility, reduce costs, with easy-to-use DIY tools.
Whilst currently there is still a sense of Mobile MR as an emerging space - validation of the medium is in its infancy, and many clients will be nervous about shifting wholescale to mobile - the Lumi positioning is interesting. Once a sense of best practice emerges, they could well be a go-to brand in the mobile space.
This may not just be as a DIY software provider. Whilst DIY is growing fast, DIFY (Do it for you) is increasingly becoming an option - clients can choose which parts of a study they wish to execute in-house and where they are looking for outside help, driven by either cost/benefit or expertise considerations.
The following section suggests that Lumi would wish to be considered expert enough to be trusted for DIFY work too, should they wish.
Why Mobile? Closer to the Truth
In the Admap piece mentioned above, Lumi offers the following concise summary of the benefits of using mobile for certain types of MR, suggesting they bring researchers and brand owners closer to the truth:
● By removing the reliance on memory.
● By asking questions while emotions are running high.
● By adding a sense of urgency so that respondents are encouraged to respond instantly and instinctively rather than taking their time.
● By using familiar tasks that encourage quick completion, rather than deep thought.
● By asking for opinions or descriptions of events as they are happening.
● By recording the actual emotional response through facial recognition
The list contains many valid points, and is aligned with much of the current System 1/System Behavioural Economics thinking on how we make decisions.
This indicates that Lumi understand how mobile isn’t just “shorter, cheaper”. It actually offers a better option than traditional longer, post-rationalised style studies to access a more authentic take on what audiences are feeling and thinking at any moment in time.
Qual. or Quant?
Lumi are more of a specialist in quantitative mobile solutions rather than qualitative. However, qualitative is still an important part of the solution.
What characterises a good Mobile Survey?
There are three key areas Lumi sees to crafting a powerful mobile survey:
i) Make it short (“chunking” or “diaryfication”)
ii) Make it fun (“gamify it”)
iii) Use technology for a smooth experience
i) Chunking: In terms of survey length, Lumi operates by breaking down longer surveys of maybe 25 minutes into smaller chunks of 5 minutes each.
Whilst Lumi currently sees no absolute limits in interview length, the principle is clear: the shorter the better.
Mobile is likely to herald the future of micro-surveys, where conciseness should to lead to enhanced participant engagement, and access audiences that were averse to the traditional picture of market research - 25 minutes lengthy questionnaire, sometimes repetitive, seldom fun.
ii) Gamification: Lumi looks to integrate competitive aspects of Gamification to help keep engagement levels high.
Some examples:
● introduce leader boards
● allow respondents to see where their own behaviour measures up relative to others in that community. This could be consumption of a soft drink for example - users become more engaged to see if they are very light or particularly heavy users. They also offer features that make the MR experience more tactile and playful:
● allow participants to run their fingers up and down the screen to give feedback.
iii) Technology to Simplify Participant Experience
Alongside many features that may well soon become standard amongst mobile providers - including the ability to capture and playback videos, photos, time/date and GPS stamping (indicating location of response) - Lumi offers a number of interesting functionalities:
● complete a survey even in offline mode. If internet connection is interrupted, the survey automatically reloads at the latest point of completion.
● adaptive to the participants’ mode or device of choice - be it mobile web, ioS, Android, smartphone or tablet. For tablets, the surveys have been optimised to work with varying screen sizes.
● easy integration into existing panel management software. This feature is particularly relevant for panel providers.
● alphabetical search filter to help participants manage longer lists
One particularly interesting feature highlighted is the flexibility of their GPS-triggering.
Lumi can set GPS co-ordinates that trigger a push-reminder to respondents to complete a survey/ participate in a mobile diary. The triggering can be set for exit or entry from a particular location, but also has the flexibility to be sent with a specified time-lapse. This is a nice detail as it anticipates participant sensitivity to area fraught with potential issues - data and identity protection at the fore.
A full perusal of the Lumi’s capabilities (http://bit.ly/1lDSp51) - scripting options, survey features, respondent management tools - is impressive, as it seems extensive.
Much of what is offered is what you would expect from a traditional online DIY software provider.
This suggests that the technology is there to facilitate a transition to mobile, the factors inhibiting a broader move to mobile lie elsewhere: lack of widely understood clarity on what is good or best practice in mobile MR.
Which Areas of Research is Mobile most Relevant?
There are three main areas Lumi engages in:
● Managed Events
● Panel Integration
● Broadcast Media
i) Managed events.
These could be conferences, rock concerts, Year End Fireworks, Corporate events...any type of event where participants either need to (an AGM) or wish to (a Rock Concert) make their voice heard and registered in the moment.
Lumi sees the value of using mobile in conjunction with traditional online to capture data that respondents find easier to sitting at a laptop. They don’t see it as a stand-alone medium.
At an outdoor event it could be a mixture of “in the moment” reactions to a band, a song, a particularly loud firework bang, mixed in with contextual data gathered both pre- and post event from a pre-recruited community.
The key advantages in using Lumi mobile for managed events are: :
- lower cost
- greater comfort, use your own device
- GPS enabled, the ability to “time-stamp” - meaning project owners or organisers can access who voted for what when, potentially important in corporate legal situations.
ii) Panel integration
Lumi works with a wide range of panel providers to help them transition to mobile in a cost-effective but technically smooth manner. The guiding principles are a mix of technology and user experience aspects as described above.
● Smart and appropriate use of push-notification
Mobile is particularly valuable as a data collection mode that can access reactions close to when an event occurs - a shopping experience, watching a TV show, visiting a website. Lumi refers to this as “event-based triggering”: respondents are pre-recruited so they give permission for their mobile locations to be tracked, and then are sent invitations based on location.
Geo-Triggering: Case Studies
i) Maximising Respondent Engagement in Geo-Triggering
Lumi realises that geo-triggering can create a negative respondents reaction: unwanted, unexpected intrusion into a personal space, an invasion of privacy leading to knock-on concerns about data and identity protection.
They overcome this by delaying the invitation to participate.
An example: if a Bank wishes to understand the experience of ATM withdrawal, sending an SMS 60 seconds after the withdrawal is likely counterproductive. Lumi looks to address this concern by sending time-delayed invitations - allowing a sufficient time gap to avoid intrusiveness, but without waiting too long so that memory becomes an issue again. 5 - 10 minutes might be appropriate in this instance.
ii) Longitudinal use of mobile - Contact Lens Provider
Lumi worked with a contact lens provider who wished to understand changing levels of comfort amongst those who switched lens types over time.
A panel was pre-recruited and sensitised to the fact that they would receive invitations to surveys across a certain time period of say a week. The sampling framework stipulated relevant time periods that would be critical - early, later on, and the number of overall contacts per respondent.
This allowed responses to be classified according to time of day. Respondents were also invited to give not just their comfort levels, but also to say what they were doing at the time - in an office, in front of a computer, at a pub, at home in the bathroom - so that responses could be analysed accordingly.
Lumi also uses publicly available data on air quality by location to overly onto the survey results to further calibrate and understand the responses.
iii) Broadcast Media
60% of all UK TV audiences use their mobile devices whilst watching TV.
Programme makers have a dual-interest in this: capture viewers views whilst they are watching, and enhance their enjoyment of the programme by offering something fun designed specifically for mobile.
Lumi develops tailor-made apps for this kind of need, featuring
- chats
- polls
- quizzes
Again, competitive gamification aspects were integrated to ensure high engagement levels: visible leader boards, daily prizes, a grand prize.
Future of Mobile
Lumi sees the potential for mobile to transform many industries. Two they focus on are education (m-learning) and healthcare (digital healthcare).
● m-learning - according to Dan Foreman, this development of e-learning may even enjoy a faster take-up than the use of mobile in market research. Mobile learning offers numerous advantages: “chunking” - learning small sections - use of videos, is interactive, allows people to listen via their headphones to phrasing in language learning.
● Digital Health - particularly valuable for longer term and quasi-constant (measures every 2 minutes) patient monitoring of key health signs - heart rate, respiration rate, temperature.
Lumi has engaged in a partnership with a wireless healthcare specialist - Toumaz Group (www.toumaz.com) - who provide bio-degradable patches that communicate with mobile devices and so allow passive health monitoring.
This allows valuable comparisons to be made between claimed activity and actual behavioural monitoring, with follow-up prompts an option.
The implications of this for healthcare are huge:
● earlier detection of deterioration
● earlier intervention
● shorter hospital stays
● reduced treatment costs.
Summary/ Outlook
● Gamification and diaryfication are essential to make the mobile MR experience manageable: shorter, more fun, competitive.
● Mobile market research offers access to more immediate reactions, avoid memory-gaps and facilitates higher degree of accuracy and authenticity.
● DIY mobile solutions - as well as DIFY options - are available and likely to grow in importance.
● Mobile solutions will change many industries radically. Improvements in healthcare and learning are just two areas where mobile saves money, improves efficiency, reduces costs.
● Mobile is about engagement as much as insights. It has a relevance for Marketeers - the owners of a TV game show for example as a second screen who can give real-time reactions to what they do or don’t like on their TV screen - as well as Researchers.
● Mobile is a playful, multi-purpose medium - research needs to engage, be concise.