Their mission is to help families across the UK stop their bad shopping habits and surprise them with how much money they could save if they change their spendthrift ways.

Each episode will see Alex and Steph help a family who want to spend less and save more. They’ll be uncovering the traps many of us fall into and will challenge the families to trial money-saving alternatives to hopefully prove to them that it is possible to slash their spending and start them saving without changing their lifestyle.

Professor Shankar returns to the series to delve deeper into consumer behaviour and gives tips and tricks to help people become savvier spenders.

Emotion-fuelled spending

Professor Shankar said: “The simple solution to spending less might seem obvious – buy less stuff. But for many of us, shopping is a leisure activity and it’s a key way that we spend time with friends and family. Add in the well-honed tactics used by brands to make us feel we need to buy their product, plus retail designers manipulating our emotions to make us more susceptible to parting with our money, and it’s easy to see why making a rational decision to shop less isn’t as easy as it sounds.”

To show the families the error of their ways Alex and Steph resort to shock tactics. By creating their very own pop up shop filled with the contents of the family home they are forced to face up to their spendthrift ways.

To really put them to the test the family homes are taken over and their usual branded products are replaced and put in plain packaging. Most will be cheaper but some will be kept the same to see just how well they know their products. Occasionally some are more expensive to show that sometimes it is worth spending more.

Shop Well for Less runs on BBC1 for six weeks from Thursday 23 February at 8pm. Follow the show on social media @ShopWellForLess.