A new Slop University brochure introduces STAMP, the School of Emergent Priorities' five-level maturity model for small-trader loyalty and payment infrastructure, and the advisory-service eligibility rule now built on it.
STAMP, a new maturity model for shopfront loyalty and payment systems, ties advisory-service eligibility to keeping any record of a return customer.
A paper stamp card behind a till and a supermarket’s real-time reward tier are, to a shop, just two ways of remembering a regular. To the School of Emergent Priorities, they are two points on the same ladder, and the School has turned the distance between them into STAMP, a five-level maturity model for small-trader loyalty and payment infrastructure unveiled today in a new showcase brochure.
The Trajectory Analytics Group built the ladder from a habit most shops already keep in some form, sequencing it into five named stages from Untracked through to Predictive and testing each rung against what a till can show a researcher without a trader explaining anything. The University’s small-commerce advisory service has adopted the second rung, Recorded, as its floor: a shop keeping any record of a return customer, down to a name in a notebook, remains eligible for a consultation, and one that keeps none no longer does.
A rung only means something once someone asks what it would take to climb it, and traders have started asking.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, School of Emergent Priorities
“We built the eligibility floor as low as the ladder allows,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School of Continuous Improvement’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, whose Adaptive Metrics Lab audits the terminal data STAMP’s higher rungs depend on. The brochure sets the new instrument beside seven of the University’s published studies of ordinary commerce, from a grocery chain’s markdown forecasting to a food truck’s autonomous refund waiver, tracing the rung logic back to the till-float rubric it was built from.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sf5yeh.