Possibilities for Market Research: GPS Apps

Dana Stanley reviews Foursquare, a mobile phone app that uses GPS to note your location and allows you to leave comments and connect with friends. This technology creates new ways for market researchers to connect with consumers in the moment of their purchase.

I’ve recently been experimenting with Foursquare, an increasingly popular service that enables you to “check-in” using a mobile phone at various physical locations such as restaurants and retail stores. You can also use the service to leave tips for others about specific locales, like what the best dish is to order at your favorite restaurant. Like any social application, Foursquare allows you to connect with friends who use the service, giving you real-time updates on your friends’ check-ins.

As an early technology adopter, I’m having fun with Foursquare. While as of yet it’s no Twitter, Foursquare is a cool way to connect, learn, and share information about the world socially using technology. As the service increases in popularity, its content will certainly become more and more compelling.

Applications such as Foursquare that use the GPS feature in phones are increasingly common. Messages sent through Google Buzz and Twitter have an optional location-specific GPS code which allows the placement of your message on a map.

The possibilities for GPS-enabled mobile applications are virtually endless.

This begs the question, naturally, of how the market research industry can take advantage of this trend. Could we work with application providers to recruit respondents? This opens up the possibility of highly accurate geographic targeting. It also gives us the ability to intercept respondents at the precise moment we need them. Imagine serving a customer a mobile phone survey just when they check into a Starbucks. There could also be interesting implications for B2B respondent recruitment.

-March 2009

This content was provided by The Operandi Group. Visit their website at www.operandigroup.com.