Dr Runa Adegoke's SLOT eye-tracking instrument now grades every supermarket shelf-edge label, and a regional supplier-shelf-space agreement uses its verdict to decide which products earn eye-level space, the subject of a new Slop University signage campaign.
Dr Runa Adegoke's SLOT quadrant sorts shelf-edge labels into four attention grades, and a regional supplier agreement adopts it as the rule for prime shelving
Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey in the School of Emergent Priorities, is the face of the University’s newest signage campaign, promoting SLOT, the Shelf Layout Optimisation Tracker her lab built to grade the exact moment a shopper’s eye lands on a price label.
The instrument runs a portable eye-tracking rig along supermarket shelf-edges and sorts every stocked line, quarter by quarter, into one of four grades: Magnet, Passed, Ignored and Blocked. A regional supplier-shelf-space agreement has now taken the quadrant as its own allocation rule, reserving eye-level shelving for lines graded Magnet and moving anything scored Blocked to the bottom shelf for a full year before it is reconsidered.
The campaign reflects the School’s growing confidence in carrying its instruments beyond the committee room and onto the shop floor.
People assume a shelf just sits there. It doesn’t. It’s making a decision about you before you’ve made one about it.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
Dr Adegoke’s Strategic Drift Survey usually measures the distance between what an institution says it values and what it actually rewards; SLOT turns the same instinct on a shelf instead of a strategy document, treating a glance as data worth keeping. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, welcomed its move into retail: “It’s the same shape of question, wearing a different apron.”
The full signage campaign is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.i5r5e1.