Home » Archives for September 2016

CDRC Intern Shortlisted for Information is Beautiful Award

CDRC Data Visualisation Intern, Herwig Scherabon, has been shortlisted for two categories in the KANTAR Information is Beautiful Awards.  The visualisations which Herwig developed, whilst studying for an MDes in Graphic Design at Glasgow School of Art, have been nominated for awards in the ‘Data Visualisation’ and ‘Interactive Visualisation’ Categories.

Affordability Explorer

herwig-2

See visualisation and vote

The Affordability Explorer is an interactive app that maps data about the housing affordability of 584 cities. The main intention is to inform about relation between house price, income and affordability.

Income Inequality in Los Angeles and Chicago 

herwig

See visualisation and vote

The two large prints (150x75cm) are visualizations of income inequality in Los Angeles and Chicago.  The images are abstract diagrams of these cities and show a high resolution matrix of blocks. The height of these blocks corresponds to the income in the respective output area.

Herwig is currently completing an internship at the CDRC and Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.  We will be sharing more of his visualisations over the coming months.

UK food retailing and the challenge of the ‘new retail’

Alan Treadgold is a London-based global adviser to retail businesses.

He recently provided this guest blog.

In mid-August, ASDA, the UK’s third largest food retailer by sales, announced its worst ever sales results. Like-for-like sales in stores open for more than one year (a standard industry measure) fell by 7.5% for the three months to the end of June. That was even worse than the 5.7% decline reported for the previous quarter and the 5.8% decline for the quarter before that. In fact, ASDA is now in a period of 8 consecutive quarters of declining like-for-like store sales. For a food retailer, sales declines of these levels are calamitous. Profit margins are very slender at the best of times (and these are most definitely not the best of times for the major grocery retailers in the UK) and big losses of sales volumes get strongly magnified in terms of their impact on profitability. And yet on exactly the same day that ASDA was confirming just how bad its sales position is, Amazon announced that it would open in early 2017 another fulfilment centre – its thirteenth – in the UK. Part—but only part—of the reason why Amazon needs more capacity is due to the initial success of its Amazon Fresh food delivery business which launched in the UK in July 2016.

“ASDA KX57OLO 110110”, by EDDIE. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr. - See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2016/08/food-retailing-challenge/#sthash.4BYl9Tdh.dpuf
ASDA truck, by EDDIE via Flickr

 

So what’s going on? Is ASDA’s trading difficulties and Amazon’s continued expansion an illustration in a nutshell of a transformation from the store-based world of ‘old’ retailing to the online world of ‘new’ retailing? Well, yes and no.

For ASDA the conundrum is that, as arguably the most consistently price focused of the major UK grocers, the business ought to be trading better than it is in the face of strong competition from the aggressive price-led grocery discounters, Aldi and Lidl. The fact that it isn’t points to big structural challenges. Price deflation is a structural feature of the UK grocery retailing marketplace. It is almost impossible to increase prices to shoppers who have a growing range of shopping options, including online. And when you can’t – structurally – increase prices you have to have an offer and a brand that truly engages with shoppers in order to add sales volume, and you have to have a very, very efficient cost base. ASDA doesn’t appear to have the first and perhaps not the second either. At the same time as it’s trying to ‘fix the basics’ of its existing business, ASDA is also challenged to radically reconfigure its business to better fit with the very changed expectations of a lot of shoppers. What this means in practice is a very strong online ordering and fulfilment business as well as smaller stores in more convenient locations that work for busy shoppers wanting to buy smaller amounts of food more frequently and closer to the point of need. ASDA doesn’t have either.

For Amazon there is a sense of a business which continues to invest ahead of the curve in that the infrastructure is being built while the business works simultaneously to add more shoppers and more sales volume. Jeff Bezos has spent the entire history of Amazon preaching the same message to his sometimes impatient investors: stick with us and sustained profits will come as volumes grow. That’s looking much closer today than it did even a few years ago. In this sense Amazon’s challenge is the exact opposite of ASDAs. While ASDA is challenged by declining sales and loss of customer engagement, Amazon is dealing with the challenge of absorbing strong sales growth and more customer acquisition across multiple categories, including now grocery

Where will this end? It’s clear that there’s too much capacity in UK food retailing and the challenges are getting worse as the discounters grow and the online operators advance further. More large stores will close and more price competition seems inevitable which will further strain already marginal profitability and the patience of investors. Indeed, investor patience may be so tested that ownership changes will happen. Shoppers have more choice and retailers have more opportunities to realise them, but the transitional challenges are tremendous.

Alan Treadgold is the author, together with Jonathan Reynolds (CDRC), of Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (OUP 2016).

Navigating the New Retail Landscape
Navigating the New Retail Landscape

CDRC Researcher named as UKDS Data Impact Fellow

CDRC PhD Student Rachel Oldroyd has been named as one of five UKDS Data Impact Fellows.

The programme is designed to support the use of UK Data Service data and resources by new generations of scholars through the research partnerships they develop and the students they teach. The quality of applications was high and it was a difficult choice for the judges who additionally awarded two runners-up prizes.

The Fellows will now begin new activities to extend the impact of their research and will write for the UKDS Data Impact Blog about their progress and develop case studies as they go on to share the outcomes of their role as UK Data Service Data Impact Fellows.

Rachel Oldroyd is a quantitative human geographer based at the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) within the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) at the University of Leeds. She commented: “I’m delighted to be named as one of five UK Data Impact Fellows. I’m a huge advocate of the UK Data Service so I’m looking forward to promoting their data and resources through my research and teaching activities. It’s also a great opportunity to increase the impact of my research in food safety.”

Rachel started a part-time ESRC White Rose Studentship in October 2015 and her PhD is centred on spatial data analytics for food safety, with particular focus on foodborne illness. Her research investigates the incidence of foodborne illness in the UK through innovatively combining data sources such as the UK census, online restaurant reviews, socio-economic data and food establishment hygiene scores to identify populations at risk; construct spatial-temporal models of food safety at varying geographies; and explore the utility of these models as a means to target scarce resources.

Find out more about the UKDS Data Impact Fellow 2016 programme.

CDRC Director presents at ODI Futures Meeting

CDRC Director, Paul Longley gave a talk at the ODI Futures meeting held in partnership with dunnhumby on the 21st September. The theme of the meeting was ‘Show me the Future of Data in Retail’. Paul reviewed the service structure of the CDRC and discussed the forthcoming CDRC/Office for National Statistics Names Classification tool.

CDRC welcomes new MSc Students

CDRC Director, Professor Mark Birkin, welcomed 50 new students to the Consumer Data Research Centre today.  The students, who visited the Centre for the first time, are studying on our new MSc Consumer Analytics and Marketing Strategy course.

Taught by leading academics from the University of Leeds, the course explores a range of analytical techniques including applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and retail modelling, consumer and predictive analytics and data visualisation.

Throughout the course the students will also focus on developing the softer skills to use the results of these analyses to inform decisions about marketing strategy.

The academic team leading the course – Prof Matthew Robson, Dr Andy Newing & Dr Yeyi Liu – highlighted some of the key opportunities for students in the coming year:

Delivering a fresh and exciting MSc

Prof Matthew Robson: “There are no other postgraduate programmes currently combining consumer science with marketing strategy. Our new MSc is fresh and exciting in its combination of consumer analytics content (largely provided by the School of Geography), with marketing strategy knowledge (provided by the Marketing Division of the Business School).”

Developing relevant skills and knowledge

Dr Yeyi Liu: “Students can expect to gain relevant marketing knowledge including understanding consumer behaviour, developing marketing strategy and designing integrated marketing communications. They will gain important analytical skills, including customer data analysis, predictive analysis and effective decision making.”

Gaining ‘hands on’ experience

Dr Andy Newing:We firmly believe that it is important for our students to gain ‘hands on’ experience. They will work with examples of real consumer data and realistic business scenarios throughout the course. In Semester 2 we offer a taught module, Marketing Research Consultancy Project, which gives students the opportunity to work in small groups on a live project or problem set by our partner firms. Students can also opt to complete their summer research project (dissertation) as a consultancy project working with an external company, using skills from the course to address a practical problem for that organisation. This could include developing a marketing strategy, identifying opportunities for a company to expand its store network, or evaluating potential new markets in which to launch a new product or store.”

The full interview with the academic team and further information on the 2017 course can be found here.

From ‘conforming stores’ to digital first: the changing world of retail

Alan Treadgold is an independent consultant to retail and consumer products companies globally. He has a long background in advertising and management consulting.

Alan recently provided this guest blog.

I was in a taxi in Hong Kong several years ago, stuck in traffic in the pouring rain. I said to my Hong Kong-based colleague how notable it seemed that all the apartment buildings looked exactly the same. “Cheaper that way isn’t it?” was his response, “Just design one then put up 50. Obvious really.”

Retailing used to feel much the same as designing apartment blocks in Hong Kong. Just design one store then roll out 20, 50, 100, 1000 of them. “Conforming stores” were very much the order of the day, especially if you were in the business of ‘big box’ retailing.

But today the world of retailing looks completely different…

 

Shopping trolley by Yandle. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr
Shopping trolley by Yandle, Flickr

 

No-one talks about conforming stores anymore. In fact, there’s plenty of people (although I’m not one of them) who would say that the future of retailing isn’t a physical store-based activity at all. Digital natives have never lived in a world without mobiles and high speed internet access so the world they have grown up in is ‘digital first, physical stores maybe’.

Whatever the end game looks like, it’s very clear that the challenges for retail enterprises and for the people tasked with leading them look very, very different today. As recently as a generation of leaders ago, coming up through the stores and having an instinctive feel for merchandise was seen as much the most important – perhaps even the only – pre-requisite to achieving success.

Today, when leaders of most retail businesses are asked what their main pre-occupations are – over and above the previous hour’s sales, obviously – you tend to hear a lot about needing to be much more competent in engaging difficult to engage digitally literate shoppers.

Here’s just a few of their concerns:

  • Having far more visibility on their shoppers and on where product is in much more complicated supply chains.
  • How to keep stores relevant and appealing to shoppers.
  • How to rebuild distribution networks so that they can cost effectively deliver huge numbers of small baskets of products to shoppers’ homes, workplaces and so on.

You’ll also tend to see a great deal of hand wringing about how so much more cost and complexity is being added into their business while, at the same time, shoppers simply won’t pay more because they know the price of everything and have almost infinite choice of where to get it anyway.

There’s a common thread to all of these very real and very widely held concerns…

The skills of individuals, the capabilities of the enterprise, and the organisation of the business all need to be very different today from what has been ‘fit for purpose’ and worked well in the past. Art Peck, CEO of Gap said it well when he said that: “We’ve been doing business the same way for 40 years, and there are very few 40-year-old business models that are successful forever.”

For many retail enterprises, this will almost certainly mean that skillsets need to become that much deeper and, well, that much more skilled.

Consider the marketing function as an example. Deep skills around digital campaign design and engagement through social media were simply not part of the marketing department skillset even a few years ago. Today they are mandatory.

In some areas – notably the logistics function for many – investment and focus needs to be very substantially ramped up. Other areas such as store development – traditionally regarded as being at the heart of a retail business – are being de-emphasised, if not absolutely then certainly relatively.

And this changes organisational structures.

It’s very easy now to imagine retail businesses with far flatter structures than they have had in the past, with the objective of making decision making faster and more joined up across an ever-proliferating set of touchpoints to the shopper. It’s also very possible to see a wide range of functions such as stores and marketing reporting into a Director of Shopper Engagement or some similar role.

As their shoppers and their businesses change, so too do the requirements of those tasked with leading retail businesses.

The days of the merchant prince are almost certainly over for many. So too are the days when CEOs had to have spent 20 years or more coming up through the stores before they were considered ready to lead the business. Too store-centric and too limited a world view will be how many now view such a progression. This means that it’s logical and helpful for many retailers to want to look outside the sector for their leaders.

The personal leadership attributes that look likely to define success today are very much around an ability to recruit and retain the best talent; to define and navigate paths of change that may leave the business looking very different to that which went before, and to create a culture that embraces risk, encourages innovation, and is tolerant of failure as the necessary price of change. Important also is the personal ability to lead effectively in environments that are necessarily defined above all else by uncertainty.

Sounds challenging? Well, yes it is. But the rewards are great and, even more to the point, the risks of thinking that this is an era of “business as usual” in retail-land are gone forever.

Alan Treadgold is the author, together with Jonathan Reynolds (CDRC), of Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (OUP 2016).

Navigating the New Retail Landscape
Navigating the New Retail Landscape

 

CDRC Director delivers keynotes in South Korea

CDRC Director Paul Longley delivered a variety of keynotes in Seoul, South Korea, from 31 August – 2 September 2016.

The opening keynote took place at the Smart Geospatial Expo on 31 August 2016. This three day exhibition attracted some 10,000 visitors, including government ministers from several countries.

While in South Korea, Paul also gave the opening keynote at the International Conference on Geospatial Information Science on 2nd September, and gave guest lectures in Seoul National University and Konkuk University.

For all keynotes Paul discussed in detail the work of the CDRC, including discussions on the geospatial analysis of consumer data.

All events were well received, including across social media channels.

Big Data Network exhibition at the RGS Annual Conference

The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC), along with the Economic and Social  Research Council’s (ESRC) Big Data Network partners hosted an exhibition about big data at this year’s Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference.

The joint exhibition on Thursday 1 September asked the question ‘What can big data tell us?’, with the CDRC, Business & Local Government Data Research Centre (BLG), Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), UK Data Service (UKDS), Administrative Data Research Centre-England (ADRC-E) hosting interactive stands to discuss the theme and to showcase services available within each centre which can prove useful for attendees in their own area of work.

Taking place throughout the day and attended by a rep from each Centre, the event had an excellent turnout. With the CDRC, attendees were particularly interested in our interactive mapping portal and information about accessing our safeguarded and secure data.

Attendees also engaged in a discussion about the types of datasets they would like to see the network host and why. Feedback ranged from time series to food consumption datasets.

For the official programme.