A new Slop University research poster ranks four ways shoppers sign up for a supermarket loyalty card by how long the resulting membership stays active, and reports that participating chains are mandating the best-performing channel storewide.
A School of Emergent Priorities poster ranks four loyalty-card enrolment channels by how long membership lasts, and participating chains adopt the top-ranked channel as their only one
The School of Emergent Priorities has spent several cycles turning its attention from how priorities are described to how ordinary sign-up moments quietly decide who counts as a member at all. Its newest research poster, released today, applies that lens to the supermarket checkout: which of four ways a shopper joins a loyalty scheme predicts whether the card survives past the first receipt.
Dr Anouk Mensah and Dr Torun Ezeigwe sorted enrolment across 214 branches and six chains into four channels — a cashier’s verbal ask, an in-store prompt, an app push, and a receipt QR code — and tracked how long each resulting membership stayed active. Cards opened by a cashier’s spoken ask outlasted every other channel by a wide margin; those opened by scanning a receipt QR code lapsed soonest. On the strength of the gap, the participating chains are retiring the other three channels and making the cashier’s ask the only way a new member can sign up from next quarter.
A channel that recruits a member quickly and a channel that keeps one are not obviously the same instrument, and a scheme that only ever measures the first will keep choosing badly without knowing it.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, School of Emergent Priorities
The work extends the School’s wider interest in how a measurement taken at one moment comes to stand in for a commitment made much later, and the researchers say the storewide mandate now underway will let them test whether a taxonomy built to describe a gap holds up once it is asked to close one.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sys1pd.