Developing new ways to understand town centres

IPM is part of a new £1m government-backed consortium, part-funded by Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency, which will improve the customer experience on the high street. 

The car changed where and how we shop in the last century and now the internet is doing the same. How should towns respond? How will they attract customers? "We know from our work on High Street UK2020 that the future for town centres  requires operators to cooperate in a way not previously necessary, when comparison shopping was the main attraction in locations" says Professor Cathy Parker, Chair of the Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University.

"The project will help high street stakeholders develop a more relevant collective offer, by generating much-needed place intelligence from data captured from cameras, mobile tracking beacons and open data sources/APIs" explained Diane Wehrle, Marketing Insights Director at Springboard, the company who is leading the consortium.

Project Manager, Simon Quin, commented "The use of big data and big data analysis techniques to bring insight to this problem, at both national and local scales, is a new approach. Our project will allow all stakeholders, such as individual market traders, multiple retailers, landlords, and the local authority, to decide collectively on collaboration interventions in their towns and then monitor their impact on both individual and collective sales, footfall and customer experience ratings".

The project, led by retail intelligence specialists (Springboard), is a partnership between IPM and retail and IS researchers (Manchester Metropolitan University), big data and computing experts (Cardiff University), technology designers and usability experts (MyKnowledgeMap), retail property owners/managers (BCSC, New River Retail and National Association of British Market Authorities), retailers and pop-up (National Market Traders Federation and Bo-Concepts), High Streets (Ayr, Ballymena, Bristol, Congleton, Holmfirth, Morley and Wrexham) and policy experts (Association of Town and City Management).

The project starts in March 2016 and runs for 2 years.

For more details see the project webpages or contact Simon Quin 

Source: IPM