When James returned to Australia after working in Asia, he started MDI Global, initially with offices in Australia and South Africa, and then later the USA. Fiona soon joined and they developed their own suite of apps and web-based interface.

It soon became clear that mobile diaries presented a huge opportunity for in-the-moment mobile-based research. A giant Australian dairy chain saw this type of research as a key into understanding how dairy products fit into people’s day-to-day lives, with real-time perspective in a ‘dairy diary’.

With the MDI app, it sent reminder alerts at appropriate mealtimes or common snack times to prompt people to complete their diary. It flagged where, when and what people ate and drank. It even let them take pictures of their food or environment to show context and company.

Rich, rich data, and so much of it —

“The data started flowing in. Then it was pouring in. And it just didn’t stop,” remembers Fiona. Each data point carried an enormous amount of metadata, which together created exactly the rich, nuanced data set MDI and its client wanted.

The challenge was making sense of it all and reporting back to the client, especially with a small team. MDI needed to absorb new data every day, and map it to the correct data sets and structure. Then it needed to use that data to find insights and connections, and present those findings in a human-friendly way.

The solution needed to be automated and simple, so the small team at MDI wouldn’t be overloaded. And finally, it needed to be fast, so MDI could answer client questions on the spot. “How does that compare male vs female? What about older than 25 years vs younger? Is there a geographic bias?” “We looked at several tools, but one stood out for market research data: Harmoni, from Infotools.”

Harmoni made sense of the research, and made sense to the researcher —

Harmoni is a cloud-based tool designed to manage complex market research data sets. It gives researchers a simple, flexible way to create an underlying database, absorb new data automatically, and slice and dice the numbers to find insights and trends.

Lots of tools can manage data sets, but Harmoni is unique. It’s truly a data management and visualization tool optimized for market research. “It just does more, and it does it the way we need it done. It can automatically highlight statistical significance in respondent groups and subgroups, without us recalculating it every time. It can even handle open-ended questions.”

Harmoni lets researchers combine any number of data sets, choose parameters, and then chart those data sets together, in any number of formats. Want to see how younger females in urban areas compare to their counterparts in the regions? Two drags and three clicks, and there it is. No going back to the underlying numbers and performing detailed searches. No need to work late to deliver a response to a client’s urgent question.

“Harmoni is powerful, but it’s easy to use as well. That’s so important, because we really didn’t have the capacity to take time out for extensive training. Because it was so well designed, we could get a lot out of Harmoni quickly just by jumping into it.”

This simplicity and flexibility gave MDI huge leverage over the data. The team could spend more time uncovering insights, connections and trends instead of manipulating data.

A source of competitive advantage —

“Harmoni has been so good for us. The team at Infotools are really responsive. When I call up asking ‘Can I do this?’, they know what I’m talking about and help me make it happen. In fact sometimes they’ve realised what I want to do would be a good feature to add – and they do it. That’s so cool.”

“We’re using Harmoni for lots of our projects, both here and in our other offices. It makes things so much faster and simpler, especially when it comes to that critical presentation.”

Has Harmoni helped their business succeed?

“I guess one of its big advantages has been giving us the power to do all this data manipulation and insight mining with such a small team. It means we can deliver great results for our clients faster, and for a lower cost. It’s a real source of competitive advantage. Our current clients love seeing their data presented so dynamically, and if they’re happy we’re happy.”

About MDI –

MDI is a mobile first market research agency.

Using progressive technologies from around the world, MDI collect consumer profiles and
feedback in the most intuitive way possible: mobile phones. Operating in more than 40
countries, MDI works with some of the world’s largest consumer brands. With decades of
research experience under their belt, it delivers high impact market research outcomes
through innovative, in-the-moment and cost-effective mobile data collection and
interrogation.