Robyn Naisbitt

By Professor William Young, Chris Brown (Asda) & Andy Peloe (Callcredit)

Combining sales and demographic data can provide better insight into consumer behaviour.

The current evidence on consumer buying behaviour and sustainability issues relies on attitudinal, self-reported or national sales data. This is often not close enough to real behaviour nor helpful at a company level.

With access to sales and demographic data, we are now seeing the detail at a geographical, product or consumer type level that can only help decision making. But this can only be done through exciting collaborations across sectors.

The Consumer Data Research Centre, Asda and Callcredit came together to explore if there are links between the affluence of consumers and green-labelled products they buy. Current wisdom says green-labelled products are bought by those who are richer. Of course, we have to keep in mind when looking at this topic that retailers already choice edit some product categories providing only products with green labels.

Customer views

Asda has already been asking their customers views on sustainability issues for a number of years through their Everyday Experts panel, which is the UK’s largest survey of its kind with 20,000 members. The company wanted to take this further and worked with CDRC investigating some product categories not affected by choice editing to explore consumer behaviour.

Callcredit has a partnership with YouGov and used its survey data on green issues to model and build a green and ethical segmentation product. Callcredit has worked with CDRC to explore how this could be used in combination with other datasets.

To explore the affordability question, four datasets were used:

• product sales from Asda;
• green and ethical segmentation data from Callcredit;
• census data from the Office for National Statistics; and,
• the index of multiple deprivation for England from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The datasets have been linked to the supermarket location using the lower super output area (LSOA) in which each store is located. A LSOA is a small area geographical unit which contains approximately 1,000 individuals.

Age and gender impacts

Through regression techniques analysing the combined dataset, the results clearly indicate that for the same population the drivers and the barriers for the consumption of products vary by product. For example, for one product category those segmented as “rich” and “eco-friendly” generally purchase the green-labelled products. This is what we expected but we also found that demographics such as age and gender have positive influence.

For another product category, the results of the model indicated that purchase behaviour is influenced by green attitudes and store type but not demographics.

This is the first time a large sample comprising of actual sales data of products across a number of stores and linked to an equally large number of data points from other sources has been used. It provides valid and reliable insights into drivers and the barriers of the consumption of green-labelled products, making the results more authentic. Hence, the results clearly indicate that the consumption behaviour and the affluence of consumers varies between product categories and other factors are at play.

Sales predictions

The results of this work are still being analysed but initial conclusions have provided good outcomes for the companies. The model developed from the combination of these datasets can be used to predict the sales of products with green labels at existing and new stores using the demographics of the local population.

This will help to better target customers of particular stores with green-labelled products they are most likely to buy, rather than an all or nothing offering. CDRC was formed to conduct this type of research with companies to find exciting new insights on important societal issues, such as ethical and sustainable consumption.

Prof William Young is a Co-Investigator at the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre.  He also leads the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds. 

Dr Chris Brown is senior director sustainable business at Asda Stores. He joined Asda as an agriculture development manager with a remit to develop Asda’s strategies and activities across all sectors of agriculture. His role was extended to be head of ethical and sustainable sourcing before he was appointed to his present position in 2013, covering waste/resource management, communications and sourcing.

Dr Andy Peloe is a concept manager at Callcredit. Prior to his current role, Andy was responsible for the development of all Callcredit’s geodemographic products both in the UK and 40 international markets. As a concept manager, Andy’s focus is to seek out new data and technologies to drive forward Callcredit’s data and innovation strategy.

On 5 April 2016 the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) along with Mango Solutions, hosted ‘LondonR’, the UK’s premier meetup group for users of the R statistical programming language. This free event runs quarterly at the University College London, with a series of workshops and presentations followed by an evening of networking at the in-house bar.

The event kicked off with a workshop led by Gabor Csardi, Principal Consultant, Mango Solutions, who demonstrated the basics of R packaging, finding and browsing code of R packages on GitHub and CRAN as well as best practices for R users.

The evening session was at full capacity, with R enthusiasts in attendance for presentations by:

• RosettaHUB | the next generation data science platform – Karim Chine, RosettaHub
• Highlights from the Shiny Developer Conference | Aimee Gott, Mango Solutions
• Professional matchmaking in R | Building a simple, practicable recommender with R for matching expert professionals to those seeking expertise – Duncan Stoddard, DS Analytics

The next LondonR is scheduled for June 2016; the exact date will be posted on our website soon. For all past and present LondonR presentations, click here.

The Consumer Data Research Centre also delivers courses on R – our next course ‘Intermediate and advanced R for spatial data’ will be hosted at the University of Leeds. For more on this and all other training by the CDRC, click here.

For more on Mango Solutions.

The Leeds Digital Festival is a multi-venue, city-wide festival celebrating digital culture in all its forms, which will take place throughout the city from Monday 25th to Friday 29th April 2016.  The CDRC will be hosting, speaking and taking part in a number of events over the course of the week.

Monday 25 April

Sustainability Webinar

We’ll be starting the week with a joint event with some of our partners.  Speakers from Asda, Callcredit and Samsung will join Prof William Young for a webinar to discuss ‘How can Big Data help deliver sustainability strategies?’

During the one hour session, the panel will discuss how Big Data is currently utilised to help deliver successful sustainability initiatives within Asda, Callcredit and Samsung.  The panel will also participate in a live Q&A session with the audience.

Find out more

The City Talking: Tech in Leeds

On Monday evening we will be attending the premiere of ‘The City Talking: Tech in Leeds’ which features CDRC Director Mark Birkin.  The hour long documentary explores the heritage and current vibe of the Leeds tech scene.

Wednesday 27 April

On Wednesday a number of our researchers will be helping out with the Vision Zero Innovation Lab, which is being held by Student Data Labs at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.

The aim of the Vision Zero Lab is to explore ways to bring the number of fatalities on the road to zero.  Attendees will be learning practical data skills whilst tackling road traffic casualties. Come along and learn practical data science skills whilst working on projects that tackle real life problems.

Find out more

Thursday 28 April

CDRC’s William Young will host the second seminar in the LIDA series:  ‘Are we really green? Evidence using big data’

The seminar is open to all and will include an update on the CDRC Ethical and Sustainable Consumption Driver Project, a short presentation on encouraging individual to choose more environmentally friendly products and a feature presentation on Environmental Footprints: Consumption-based approaches to measuring environmental impacts.

Find out more

Further information

Visit the Leeds Digital Festival Website or follow @leedsdigifest16 for further information on the events and activities being held.

Michelle Morris Director of the ESRC Strategic Network for Obesity

Overweight and Obesity are a huge problem worldwide. The cost to the UK NHS is £5.1 billion annually with £11.5 billion annual cost to wider society. This does not account for the significantly reduced health related quality of life for overweight or obese individuals.  Overweight and obesity are also closely associated with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers, which place further burden on individuals and society. It is a serious situation and one which is not going away quickly.

International experts came together in Cambridge just before Easter to explore how Big Data can be used to tackle obesity and obesity related diseases.  The audience of 60 consisted of academic and non-academic experts, with wide ranging interests including big data, nutrition, health and geography.

The second of four meetings, this meeting focused on Data, Methods and Models.  The morning session included presentations from network members followed by a panel discussion.

Presentations

Dr James Woodcock (CEDAR) & Dr Robin Lovelace (CDRC) discussed modelling and visualising large datasets to guide active policies. They presented a case study on the new Propensity to Cycle Tool, to demonstrate how novel forms of data and Big Data can serve public health through promotion of active travel.

Key points covered during the presentation included the issue that information needed for understanding travel behaviour and health are not at consistent geographies (Dr James Woodcock) and the need to join up public health/obesity research with training in coding, i.e. if you want to ‘do’ big data, you need to know how to code (Dr Robin Lovelace).

Dr Darren Greenwood from the University of Leeds covered interpreting results from analysis with Big Data and provided a number of interesting examples from epidemiology.  He covered the common pitfalls and encouraged the audience to think about what makes data ‘big’.

Prof Adam Drewnowski, Director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the School of Public Health provided an international perspective on Big Data and the Obesity Epidemic.  He explained why the commonly presented state level obesity maps are not helpful and presented some interesting findings on the links between property prices and obesity.

The presentations and videos are available here.

Panel Discussion

Dr Seraphim Alvanides, Dr Daniel Lewis and Dr Sandy Tubeuf joined the morning’s speakers for a lively panel discussion before lunch, exploring the practicalities of using Big Data in the fight against obesity.  Key points covered in the panel session include:

• Issues around identification of subjects in data analysis with GPS coordinates discussed. Discussion included methods of analysis and the importance of masking location in code which is shared in addition to results which are disseminated. The importance of confidentiality and consent where applicable was highlighted.
• There is chance of generating erroneous inferences from ‘big data’ if robust analysis methods are not used. Discussion focussed around whether it is better to be ‘roughly right’ rather than ‘precisely wrong’.
• ‘Big Data’ invites opportunity for ‘hypothesis free’ research. Discussion followed around the need for a priori hypotheses and whether ‘hypothesis free’ analysis is good research practice or just a ‘fishing expedition’.

Attendees took advantage of the winter sun and took a short walk around Cambridge, before ending the day with a networking lunch.

Dr Pablo Monsivais, who chaired the meeting commented on the success of the day: ‘I was pleased to see such a high level of interest and engagement from the audience, over half of which were not network members.  We need fresh, joined-up approaches to tackling obesity and the talks and workshop illustrated how this strategic network is enabling important intellectual and methodological advances using big data.”

If you weren’t able to join us, you can follow the day via the Meeting Storify Board.

The next meeting will take place in London on Wednesday 18 May 2016.  The meeting will follow a similar format but will focus on Novel Results & Visualisation. Book online.

Our latest interactive visual maps the most popular employment for each of the 220000 statistical small areas* within the UK.

Put together by our senior research associate Oliver O’Brien, this map re-uses the “top result” technique utilised in all other CDRC Maps.

Explore it yourself – Top jobs across the UK.

For background information on the map, read Oliver O’Brien’s blog post. 

We’d be interested to hear your feedback, connect with us on twitter:@cdrc_uk or facebook.com/cdrcuk. Alternatively, email: info@cdrc.ac.uk.

* Known as Output Areas in Great Britain and Small Areas in Northern Ireland.

Wouter van Tol
Director of Sustainability and Citizenship
Samsung Electronics Europe.

We are pleased to announce that Wouter van Tol will be joining our panel of expert speakers for the CDRC Big Data and Sustainability webinar on Monday 25 April, 13.00 – 14.00.

Wouter van Tol is Director of Sustainability and Citizenship at Samsung Electronics Europe.  One of his responsibilities is to lead a programme to improve the digital skills of 400,000 young people across 28 European countries.  He is also closely involved in social and environmental impact in the supply chain.

Wouter has a PGCert in Sustainable Business from the University of Cambridge and an MA from University of Twente in his home country, the Netherlands.  He lives in York.

During the webinar, Wouter will be discussing Samsung’s SmartThings Hub which connects devices, enables sharing of content, but also enables real time monitoring of energy use from anywhere using a smartphone.

Wouter commented: “Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies that redefine the worlds of TV’s, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions.

We are also leading in the Internet of Things space with the open platform SmartThings, our broad range of smart devices, and through proactive cross-industry collaboration.”

Samsung employ 319,000 people across 84 countries with annual sales of US $196 billion.  To discover more, and for the latest news, feature articles and press material, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at news.samsung.com

We look forward to working with Wouter and Samsung on this exciting project.  Register now to reserve your place.

By Wouter van Tol and Prof William Young

As a fully-connected world develops, smart technology will help reduce energy use and promote more sustainable lifestyles.

The “internet of things” (IoT) is the embedding of infrastructure, devices and buildings with sensors and electronics to communicate with each other and users. Through connected devices, big data gives us knowledge to better manage our health, resources, infrastructures and other efficiencies.

The interesting thing about IoT is that it is still very much in its infancy, but growing up at mind-boggling speed. We simply cannot imagine all the possibilities yet, just as we were unable to imagine many the possibilities of a mobile phone say 10 years ago.

Many leading companies are working hard to develop products that can be fully interconnected over the next few years. No doubt, some of the biggest benefits to consumers (and to society!) will be developed by 2020, even if they are hard to imagine right now.

From a sustainability point of view we are exploring a host of ideas at CDRC. What will the impact be of the “smart home” on energy use and cost, and how can smart homes enable elderly people to live independently for longer – and thereby save healthcare systems money? How can “smart cities” help to manage traffic flows better? How can IoT enable supply chains to become more transparent at a lower cost?

We can imagine consumers being better able to control their household’s energy use not only for heating and cooling but also in terms of use of appliances and devices. This can lead to households being smartly connected to the wider energy grids where appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers and electric cars use power when there is grid capacity.

This is where potentially larger emissions reduction could be achieved through reduce in energy wastage. Smart hub devices can connect devices, enable sharing of content, but also real-time monitoring of energy use from anywhere using a smartphone.

In addition, connecting the autonomous or self-drive car to city transport systems could help better management of traffic and make journeys more efficient. Of course the data collected by these sensors and electronics will help us to understand how consumers behave and create opportunities for nudges towards sustainable lifestyles.

This of course has to be balanced with the energy use of IoT sensors and electronics as well as the resource use and recycling of the equipment. Without this the benefits of IoT could be reduced.

A final important point is this. Will the world have enough people with the skills to grasp the sustainability opportunities hidden in all that data? Currently there are five million young people unemployed in Europe. Yet at the same time, there are more than 800,000 ICT vacancies. Why? Part of the reason is the digital skills gap; young people are currently leaving university without gaining the digital skills that employers are crying out for.

The CDRC is investing significant resources to develop data science capability in the UK, through training and education, but also through collaborative projects with companies such as Samsung, who are also investing in the digital skills of 6-24 year olds across 28 European countries.

Free big data webinar: Monday 25^th April 13.00 BST – CDRC and Innovation Forum webinar on big data and sustainability.

With: William Young, professor of sustainability and business, University of Leeds; Chris Brown, senior director of sustainable business, Asda; Andy Peloe, concept manager, Callcredit; Wouter van Tol, director of sustainability and citizenship, Samsung.  Register now to reserve your place. 

Wouter van Tol is director of sustainability and citizenship at Samsung Electronics Europe. He leads a programme to improve the digital skills of 400,000 young people across 28 European countries and is closely involved in social and environmental impact in the supply chain.

Prof William Young is a co-investigator at the CDRC. He also leads the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, UK. 

CDRC researcher Oliver O’Brien channelled his research skills into exploring whether the image of a man holding aloft a giant rat was infact ‘giant’ after all.

Gas Engineer Tony Smith (pictured) claimed last week to have come across a large rat in Hackney, London and said at the time: “I’ve got a cat and a Jack Russell and it was bigger than both those…”.

Our researcher was not convinced; having done the maths he explained to The Guardian newspaper that in order for the rat to be 4-ft, the man in the picture would have to be 12-ft tall – which was highly unlikely.

The full article, including Oliver’s full explanation as to why this may be a case of image trickery, can be located in The Guardian.

Michelle Morris Director of the ESRC Strategic Network for Obesity

The Big Data revolution has been embraced by health researchers and professionals. The new data horizon provides exciting opportunities to utilise new data and methods to ultimately improve the health of our nation – and in fact the world. In the health arena big data analytics has the chance to make a real impact on society, through research which informs policy and improves practice.

I’m thrilled to see so many Big Data & Health related opportunities coming up in the next few months.  The events aren’t just restricted to hearing about what is happening either, there are lots of chances for you to get involved, explore the available data and join the fight against the health issues affecting the UK.

Health Innovation Lab – 27 February (Leeds)

Student Datalabs will be running a data driven innovation lab at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics later this month.  It’s a great hands on opportunity for students to learn new data skills whilst working on health problems, specifically health inequalities and Type 2 Diabetes in Yorkshire.
Find out more

Obesity Network Seminar – 16 March (Cambridge)

The second meeting of the Obesity Network is open to everyone and will focus on Data, Methods & Models.  We’ve got some interesting presentations lined up including:

• Modelling and visualising large and complex datasets to guide active travel policies
• Interpreting results from analysis with big data: examples from epidemiology
• Big Data and the Obesity Epidemic

Find out more

Big Data and the Obesity Epidemic – 17 March (Leeds)

Adam Drewnowski, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Washington will be talking about Big Data and the Obesity Epidemic.  The seminar will be the first of a series of Big Data seminars held at the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.
Find out more

Webinar: Exploring diet and obesity in children using geodemographic classifications – 6 April (online)

I’ll be giving an overview of the study I conducted exploring social and spatial determinants of diet and obesity in children at a local area level in two regions of the UK.  I’ll discuss the findings and focus on the benefits of combining multiple datasets to generate greater insight into applied societal challenges.
Find out more

New Health Datasets Available

The CDRC have just made two new health related datasets available to researchers.  There is Staff Health Survey Data from Heart Research UK and a Synthetic Population, both of which are available via application to the Centre.

Funded PhD Opportunity

We currently have a funded PhD opportunity available – Generating a Leeds Geodemographic classification: applications in policy, commerce and health.  The appointed student will have the chance to work with our partners Callcredit and Leeds City Council.  The deadline for applications is 5 March 2016.
Find out more

You can find out more about Michelle’s work with the ESRC Strategic Network for Obesity on the CDRC website or via twitter.