Slop University's newest marketing poster turns a season of shopkeeper interviews about an automatic price-match approval prompt into a mandated till script, debuting ahead of this spring's Demo Quarter showcase.
A season of shopkeeper interviews about the till's automatic price-match prompt becomes a mandated script and a Demo Quarter campaign
Ask a shopkeeper what actually clears a price-match request at the till, and the honest answer rarely matches the laminated script taped beside the register. Slop University’s newest signage campaign, unveiled today by the School of Continuous Improvement, puts that answer where every passer-by can read it.
Shopkeepers already know exactly what the prompt is listening for; our work just writes it down.
— Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa, Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas
Dr Okwuosa and Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, spent a season collecting shopkeepers’ own accounts of what actually moves a request past the till’s automatic approval prompt, gathered across strip-mall shops and supermarket service counters rather than read off the printed policy. Indicator Commons has taken the resulting vocabulary and adopted it outright: every partner till is now required to recognise the one phrase shopkeepers named, regardless of what a request otherwise says. The campaign debuts on the University’s signage rotation ahead of the School’s Demo Quarter showcase this spring.
The full campaign is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lnm9qj.