In today’s fast-paced business world, business decisions require real-time insights, which are often hard to get.
While research houses are adapting, there is increased pressure to offer these “in-the-moment” insights from a wide range of people, says Andre Hugo, co-founder at M4JAM (Money for Jam).
Building a consistent and varied community to do panel and adhoc surveys that are free of bias is difficult and expensive. This challenge is compounded by the costs of technology and developing calls to action that are relevant, useful and non-invasive to maximise the response rate. While mobile offers great potential for market research, it can be challenging to leverage this platform effectively without alienating the customer and being too invasive causing them to opt out.
M4JAM understands these massive challenges that research houses face and has found a way to make this work for them through “microjobbing”. By tapping into the collaborative economy, M4JAM breaks its clients’ big projects into small tasks (jobs) that Jobbers can perform using their phones whilst going about their daily routines, in exchange for cash.
To solve the major challenges the research houses have in building a workable solution, M4JAM operates as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) rather than an app. It utilises an Official Account on WeChat, so Jobbers don’t need to download a new app to find and complete jobs to earn extra income. This gives M4JAM virtual scale, having already created a community of over 55 000 jobbers in just over three months.
Market research and microjobbing an ideal partnership
Given this huge uptake across South Africa – demographically and geographically – M4JAM offers companies interested in research the ability to gather high-quality data from a deep pool of Jobbers who willingly partake in the tasks they complete.
This provides the companies with potentially massive cost savings and speedy delivery as a result of the data being collected very quickly. The data gathered is provided to clients, in an agreed format hourly or via a real time API that connects M4JAM’s platform to the client’s systems. The mobile nature of the platform means that more consistent survey panels can be created with a greater geographical reach, stretching from the informal trade environment through to the high-end mobile consumers, which are usually difficult to access from a research point of view. At the same time, the traditional research infrastructure that requires field agents to perform face-to-face interviews now becomes redundant as jobbers are equipped with the tools to answer survey questions by themselves on their smartphones.
Connecting research to multiple marketing activities
Beyond these benefits, what makes M4JAM a perfect partner for companies interested in research is that M4JAM can do multiple brand activities at the same time as the research. These can include brand activation, consumer engagement measurement, merchandising, point of interest validation, social media creation and experience management measurement. For example, a Jobber might be asked to answer questions about an in-store product, take a photo of the product and then share it across a number of social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). This means that not only are Jobbers adding to a pool of data to drive insights, but they are also actively part of a greater marketing campaign through content creation and brand advocacy. At the same time, the instantaneous insights gained can be used to drive real time marketing as it is happening with the end consumer..
Collaborating to disrupt the traditional approach
This approach of using chat-based mobile platforms as the engagement tool disrupts the siloed approach typically used by traditional research, marketing and PR companies. Instead, it allows brands to collaborate with their real customers and understand their opinions and desires on an ongoing basis, shifting them closer to the moment of purchase.
The idea of the collaborative economy (on which microjobbing is based) is a means of “getting what I need on demand real time for less”, according to Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Crowd Companies in the US. While this speaks strongly to the consumer having the power to get what he or she wants, it also gives brands an equal footing by building their customers into their business model. It shifts the power from brands pushing information to the end consumer to allowing the end consumer to choice what brands they want to engage with, on what terms and in exchange for the value that they define.
Peter Harris from Marketing Magazine in Australia puts it well when he says, “Customers today are empowered and want an equal partnership with companies where they are providing their input on all aspects of business. This partnership is the catalyst for a new level of collaboration and feedback and we, the research and marketing professions, need to understand and acknowledge this by offering something different, something that has evolved from the days of long catchall surveys and face-to-face focus groups.”
Tapping into the mobile enabled microjobbing ecosystem is the future of research. From engaging with would-be respondents in a more relevant way on a platform that they are willing to interact with, to delivering valuable insights to clients and incorporating the research process with other marketing activities, all in a timeous and cost-effective manner, this partnership disrupts the status quo as we know it fuels the consumer revolution.
