A new marketing campaign for the Master of Applied Measurement tests supermarket express-lane compliance signage for a weekly rhythm, and reports finding none.
A Master of Applied Measurement campaign reports a null result, unsoftened
The Adaptive Metrics Lab has turned its own instrument on the shortest queue in a building it doesn’t own: the supermarket express lane. A new Slop University marketing campaign for the Master of Applied Measurement asks whether the lane’s overhead item-count signage does anything to weekly shopper compliance, and answers in the poster’s own smallprint — no trend, across the whole run, full stop.
The campaign translates a season of express-lane observation into a single, unsalvaged sentence: the signage held steady, and so did shoppers, with no week reading differently from any other. Nothing in the finding depends on identifying a slow week to explain away or a busy one to credit; the Lab’s method treated every week the same and reports what came back the same way.
Where earlier campaigns for the program have leaned on a stat worth bragging about, this one puts the absence of one in the same type size. The University’s recruitment case rests less on the answer than on what happens once a lab has one it can’t dress up.
You learn to test the express lane for a rhythm, and you learn to say so when there isn’t one. That second part is the harder skill to teach.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5w0r4s.