The coming revolution – Mobile Market Research is starting to pick up speed.  It seems like every day there is another announcement or press release regarding a new research oriented mobile offering.  This is a good thing, an exciting thing. 

Historically, the market research industry has been slow to adopt new technologies, but we seem to be quickly embracing app based-smart phones for research.  

Of course Revelation is in the thick of it.  In May 2010 we announced the launch of Revelation Mobile for iPhone and iPad app. But, as we climb this hype cycle for mobile towards a new research utopia, we should stop for a second and think about what it all means. From my perspective, I think mobile will be huge. Initially. Then it won’t. Here’s why:

Mobile will be huge because ….

Mobile is the final five yards into consumer experience
Mobile finishes off what online started – changing one of the key paradigms of the market research industry.  It used to be that we only had limited access to people and mostly it was after the fact and far removed from the situation we were interested in capturing. Online moved us closer to the moment of experience and mobile takes us the rest of the way into the moment: the moment of decision, consumption, use or purchase. This is a paradigm shift and it is great for research.

Mobile will be the dominant computing platform of the future

 My iPhone has more processing power, memory and storage than most computers from ten years ago.  The smart phone is not just a more powerful phone; it is a mobile computing experience that happens to also function as a phone.

The iPhone has led the way and now the Android is poised to become the Windows of the mobile age.  We have the old standbys like Blackberry and Symbian and we now see the new face of computing – the mobile platforms. Market research needs to be there.

Why mobile won’t be huge. Eventually...

In five years, everyone will have it
Five years from now, mobile will not be special or distinctive. It will be the de facto research platform.  Imagine a research technology provider touting online as their competitive advantage.  Today, that sounds silly, but ten years ago it was a competitive advantage.  It took us ten years to get to this point because along the way we had to get connected, bandwidth had to grow and users needed to get comfortable with being connected.  Mobile will take half the time it took online because we are already connected. 

Mobile is Technology not Methodology
There are a number of research sites that present mobile as a new methodology, but at the end of the day mobile is technology, not a new methodology.

Consider this … if you give someone a survey, a projective exercise or a diary on a mobile phone versus a computer, it is still a survey, projective exercise or diary.  The method is the same, the medium changes. Every medium provides strengths and weaknesses depending on the research task.  Mobile is the killer app for immediacy, but it is weak in expression, therefore great for your retail diaries, but not so hot for your metaphor elicitation exercises.

The big challenge will be sense-making
Market research is perpetually fascinated with the latest, shiny  data collection and interaction paradigms.  Yet, we ultimately have to make sense of all this data.  And, there is going to be a lot of it! The big challenge will not be collection, but making sense of all the data. On it's own, mobile won't help us with that. 

This is the type of thinking we do at Revelation.  We are embracing mobile, and we are excited by the potential to get closer to the consumer, that last five yards.  But, we are inclined to always look beyond the hype, when the shiny newness has worn away we want to know how it fits into the ultimate mission of market research. Mobile is going to be a great tool in this mission.  But, like all tools it will not of its own accord make great research.