Skip to main content
A supermarket retest doesn't reproduce a Trajectory Analytics Group finding

A supermarket retest doesn't reproduce a Trajectory Analytics Group finding

A new Slop University marketing poster stages Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran's retest of an earlier Trajectory Analytics Group finding at a supermarket loyalty desk, where the replication fails and the University revises its own advising protocol on the strength of it.

A single afternoon of loyalty-desk appeal calls moved a pre-set priority number that held firm across 1,381 conversations at a retail chain, and the Group is rewriting its own protocol because of it.

“The Priority Was Already Written” held across 1,381 conversations at a regional retail chain: a pre-set growth-priority text, and nothing a manager said in the room ever moved it. Retested at a single supermarket’s loyalty desk, it did not hold at all.

A new Slop University marketing poster, developed with the School of Emergent Priorities, advertises Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran’s field retest of the Trajectory Analytics Group’s chain-retailer finding. Where the original study found a pre-set priority text immovable regardless of what was raised in conversation, Dr Oyelaran’s afternoon of tier-appeal calls at a supermarket loyalty desk found the opposite: every appeal she logged changed the number.

The number moved. That’s the whole finding.

— Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, School of Emergent Priorities

The Group has not treated the result as a limitation of the original study. On the strength of a single afternoon’s data, it is revising its own Priority Durability protocol to require a live appeal channel wherever a pre-set priority text runs across the University’s advising and enrolment systems.

The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.0guusq.