[Market Research Trends] How Mobile Research Could Fit in the LatAm Region?
Consumers, shoppers and business people are using mobile devices every day in many ways around the world. Mobile devices bring the ability to communicate what is happening at any time. It is not late to start but we must jump in that train now in order to be successful market researchers in the future.
Here are some of the key points to consider when doing mobile research:
CONS
-Extra work
-Less Data
-No grids
-Only for short surveys
-Difficult to suit B2B customers
REACH + SCALE
Global Reach
Respondent Scale
Lower cost
Faster turnaround
Context & location
Video & Audio
Diaries
Ethnography
OPTIMIZED RESEARCH
Same principles as mobile friendly
Shorter, simpler, faster surveys
More frequent, nimble projects
Cross-platform questionnaire design (compatible for different devices)
Better value Exchange with respondents
Compatibility with respondent context
THE BENEFITS
Higher response rates
Faster turnaround
Lower cost
Agile decision-making
Applies to al research
Better quality data
INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGY
Maps
Photos
Web
Video
FUTURE REALITIES
Mass participation
Thousands of responses in Hours
The end of specialty panels
Blurring of quanti and quali
Data commodization
The graphs below use 2013 data to show some mainstream trends about smartphone usage and the internet.
Source: Morgan Stanley Research
Based on the graphs above, the expected trend for Latin America is to have the same high smartphone usage and penetration such as Spain or the US. Mobile Research is a reality in the region, and even if databases and trustworthy sources of information are not easy to find as in Europe or in the US, people use their smartphones more and more as part of their daily lives. There are traditional and non-traditional ways of recruiting respondents for such research. Last year, we posted on this blog that Argentina, Mexico and Brazil surpassed the US in terms of twitter penetration and the overall penetration of social media is high, so this is another example that illustrates the high penetration of new technologies in the region and the related economic potential.
Sources: Internal, GCS, MMRA, OMP.