RETAIL INNOVATION PROJECTS FOR SAINSBURY’S

With our consumer research we have driven retail innovation in Sainsbury’s supermarkets. We have studied the impact of technology on consumer experience and developed new mobile applications for the adoption of psychological science for proximity marketing.

CASE 1 . CONSUMER EXPERIENCE OF RETAIL TECHNOLOGIES

Sainsbury’s was the first retailer in Europe to install self-service checkouts in all supermarkets, giving customers a choice of how they checkout and speeding up queuing times for customers with smaller baskets. With over 1,000 stores and over 22 million customers a week – nearly half of those customers use self-service checkouts. Such a large scale implementation raised a number of critical issues that had to be addressed for the design of the technology and the most appropriate customer services and communication strategies.

APPROACH

We investigated the relative impact of emotions and cognition on the adoption of self-checkouts and on the consumer experience. A survey has been conducted on 400 consumers in the Sainsbury’s stores in various London and UK locations.

RESULT

Data indicated that younger shoppers show a stronger emotional involvement with self-checkout technology than older consumers and it boosts satisfaction for them as a result.
The study found age and self-efficacy have a strong impact on technology adoption. While younger shoppers bond with technology, such as self-checkout and, as a result, enjoy a better shopping trip; older consumers show less of an emotional attachment. A lower level of self-efficacy means older shoppers are also less accepting of in-store technologies.

IMPLEMENTATION

Results informed technology design by NCR and were adopted to design age-tailored customer services and communication.

CASE 2. E-BEACON and MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT FOR LOCATION BASED CONSUMER RESEARCH & ENGAGEMENT

We developed a new mobile application and tested a new approach for in-store mobile-based consumer research, which merges different sources of consumer data and measures the consumer’s experience in real time.

APPROACH

A first wave of data collection was conducted in Sainsbury’s Wandsworth store with 93 AIMIA loyalty customers for the experimental test on the relations between personality, emotions, impulse buying and customer experience. A second wave of data collection was run in Sainsbury’s Holborn store with 91 consumers recruited in the store for the test of the designed technology on customers’ emotions, experience and willingness to buy.

RESULTS

In-store tests showed the efficacy of the new technology-based methodology and provided important insight for the adoption of the new mobile application for an integrated strategy of consumer services and engagement.

ROLL OUT

Sainsbury and AIMIA adopted the new application and the related research approach within the previous data strategies.
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