Last week, we attended the 2013 Market Research in the Mobile World Conference in Minneapolis. We were excited to learn about mobile as an important vehicle to collect insight and learning, and to hear about trends and use cases from vendors and clients using mobile as part of their learning plans.
As a follow up, we’re interviewing several thought leaders to get their perspective on a few big ideas they took away from the conference and the implications moving forward. First up is Paul Johnson, Director of Analytics at SSI. Here are his thoughts and some questions to consider:
“A lot of people are doing mobile now because that is where people are going for their access to the internet in even normal online studies. I’m surprised that General Mills is now taking 80% of their work with a mobile component. That means as Andy Dybvig from General Mills said, we need larger, mobile specific panels.”
We agree, and saw case after case of how leveraging consumers’ use of mobile devices is become more mainstream not only because of the speed and cost efficiency, but also because of the ability to collect ideas, images and insights at the “right” time — when consumers are “in the moment.”
Of course, with the wide use of mobile devices to collect images, comes a new challenge, as Paul pointed out: “Someone needs to find a way to codify visual images. Mobile devices are bringing in visual content now, but we have no good mechanism for scaling up the analysis of these pictures. These visual images will still be only in the qualitative area until this problem is solved. Whether that is facial coding or some other type of problem that recognized objects in a picture I don’t know, but that needs to be solved for the full advantage of mobile to be recognized.”
Clearly, mobile research is providing lots of opportunities for new solutions that enable teams to capture, codify and activate learning.
Watch for more perspective from other thought leaders over the next several days.
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We work with teams to crystallize their innovation strategy, uncover insights and convert them, along with trends and cross-industry analogs, to generate ideas. We facilitate turning ideas into holistic business model prototypes that can be piloted and scaled. In addition, we create and lead training programs and modules on the skills, behaviors and knowledge that ensure innovation can happen sustainably throughout an organization.
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