“The store is a perfect lab,” explains Professor Jens Nordfält, Co-Director of the Retailing and Contemporary Consumerism Research Lab – otherwise known as the Retail Lab.

He continues:

“I’ve never really trusted research that doesn’t contain field data, because it’s so easy to manipulate or to shut out all the confounding variables and get some detailed result that never would come through in reality.”

Established in 2018, the Retail Lab brings together nearly 20 academics with a wealth of experience from across the School of Management, including Co-Director and marketing expert Professor Nancy Puccinelli. The Lab aims to break down divides between academia and retail, by carrying out research that can benefit business in the real world.

“One thing that we’re really trying to achieve is to get all the people who are part of the Lab involved in the different projects,” asserts Jens. “We want to enhance teamwork and not leave people working in isolation. We try to build a research culture that’s based on us collaborating with the companies that we are in contact with to get the very best publications possible.”

One of the Lab’s flagship initiatives is its MSc in Strategic Retailing, which welcomed its first cohort in September 2023. The course draws on relationships with household names such as IKEA, Uniqlo and H&M.

Jens says:

“It’s very good for the students to get to see what their knowledge can be used for in the real world, and it also gives us data. Some partnerships are only on an educational level, but others are more at the research level. We also collaborate very much with Swedish grocery retailers, because that’s where I have a store.”

Much of the Lab’s research revolves around the in-store environment and the impact it has on the purchases that we make – whether that’s the layout of the aisles, the merchandise itself on offer or the way in which it’s displayed to customers.

For instance, a recent paper from Jens and fellow Retail Lab member Dr Carl-Philip Ahlbom offered a practical guide for how retailers can most effectively use eyetracking technology to generate heatmaps that demonstrate which elements in a store grab the most attention.

Their research with Professor Dhruv Grewal, another Retail Lab academic, has shown several effects such as that shoppers using smartphones while shopping spend 40% more on average, that installing digital signage in a store can increase revenues by 17%, and if a couple of the digital signs are replaced by projections then sales go up even more.

Indeed, Jens identifies the creeping influence of technology as one of the biggest factors impacting the current retail landscape. “The first big shift was when people moved from paying with cash to paying with cards,” he says.

“That increased spending quite a lot because you don’t really pay attention to how much you spend. It used to be the case that if you brought £20 to the store, that was your budget. Then all of a sudden, you had all the money in your bank account with you.”

Jens, Dhruv and Carl-Philip went on to investigate the impact of handheld selfscanners on shopping habits. The results demonstrated a 13% increase in spending when people scanned their own groceries as they made their way around the store.

“One factor was that they enjoyed shopping more, and as soon as they enjoy shopping, people tend to spend more,” Jens explains.

He continues:

“They also interacted more with the packages, because you need to find the barcode. We actually found that purchases of healthy options increased by 4%, which suggests that people buy healthier food if they use handheld scanners.”

Jens suspects that self-checkouts, however, have the opposite effect on sales: people buy fewer items, because they try to carry items in their arms or use a basket rather than a large trolley. “You sort of downsize because you don’t see it as a real shopping trip,” he says.

The future of retail, though? From a technological standpoint we already see wholly unmanned stores, where the items you pick from the shelves are monitored by cameras and AI, and your card is automatically charged when you leave the shop. Jens points out that these were gradually brought closer to reality over the past 30 or so years by advances in technology. While the idea of a fully automated shopping experience might feel cold, it sometimes makes undeniable business sense: “The biggest cost driver is staffing – it’s approximately half the gross margin in any retail store, whether that's fashion or furniture or groceries. So as soon as you can, you try to reduce that.

“The whole supply chain, except the final stage, has been automated, but [unmanned] stores have now also managed that,” Jens continues. “The only human factor is the customer. I don’t know if that can be automated as well, with robots eating the produce!”