As one of the leading innovators in the field of market research, BrainJuicer Group PLC wanted to explore the possibilities and potential of using mobile phones as a research medium. 

BrainJuicer believe mobile ‘Juicing’ [BrainJuicer call surveys Juicers] to be an exciting prospect.  Worldwide, there are three times as many people accessible by mobile phones than over the internet and this is particularly true in low internet penetration but high growth developing countries around the world.   On the other hand, the challenge is to work out how to overcome the natural and current limitations of mobile phones, namely; bite-sized input and outputs, particularly if using SMS, different configuration/technologies deployed by the various network operators around the world, the cost of sending/receiving text messages and how to enrol people’s participation and satisfactorily deal with contact permission issues.

After investigating many suppliers, BrainJuicer were extremely impressed with the team at OnePoint and the simplicity, universality and robustness of their mobile survey solution.  The natural advantage of sms is its universal mobile phone access [no downloads, no compatibility issues just guaranteed access and delivery], with the natural disadvantage of the 160 character limit and the cost of texts back and forth, both of which suggest very simple and short interactions.  

The company decided to work with OnePoint to create a mobile Juicer to explore and torture-test whether this simple but robust method could be used to conduct a complex task.

For the experiment it was important to conduct a deliberately long survey to test respondents’ patience as well as the robustness of the system, counter-balanced by making the task playful and interesting.  The idea was to conduct a whole 15 question ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ quiz by mobile phone with several hundred respondents to test response, error rates, respondent experience and insight potential from the data.  BrainJuicer recruited 1,000 from their online panel willing to participate and they were sent a message which they just had to reply to in order to start the quiz.  They then received the 1st level £100 question which included the four possible answers labelled, A, B, C, D.  Respondents replied to the SMS with the letter of what they believed to be the correct answer, which then triggered the 2nd level £200 question and so on all the way through to the 15th £1,000,000 question.  For analysis and the torture test purposes the goal was for everyone to answer every question and at the end they were sent a message with how many questions they had answered correctly.

''The results were extremely impressive.  We had a 71% response rate and a 58% completion rate in 2 hours which told us that the medium has real appeal, that you can successfully conduct quite complex multi-part Juicers with rich research potential and also that the OnePoint mobile technology is incredibly robust, reliable and easy for respondents to use'' commented John Kearon, founder and CEO of BrainJuicer.

BrainJuicer have concluded that the OnePoint technology has exciting applications for what they are calling Experiential Research i.e. those real time, out-and-about occasions where mobiles would be the only possible way to gather instant, in the moment feedback and attitudes.  Examples of this would be shopper in store research or what P&G call ‘the first moment of truth’ research as well as event feedback or responses to outdoor advertising.

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