&more Lunchtime Bites: Bruce Foresight – predicting future behaviour

Exclusive for &more members, Lunchtime Bites; bitesize sessions for knowledge and networking.

What are the three mega-factors underlying post-lockdown behaviour change?

Join us at this month’s Lunchtime Bite session, where &more member Matt Walker (Customer and Member Research Manager, Co-op) will be taking us back to the halcyon days of summer 2020. Remember when we were eating out to help out, and it looked like things *might* go back to normal soon(ish)? Back then, Co-Op had tonnes of stakeholders desperate to learn how life at home, work, shopping and in communities would change longer term. However, we all know predicting future behaviour is difficult. They needed a plan, and quickly.

Bruce Foresight was a ground-breaking piece of research by Co-op and Dectech, involving over 3,000 participants across demographics, shopper segments, financial situations and attitudes to give us confident answers about future behaviour change.

The approach combined behavioural economics thinking with MR. It explored stated behaviour in a number of potential post-Covid scenarios and then created a derived view of behaviour (through measures like enjoyment, and feasibility contextualised by life circumstances). These were combined into a statistical model, integrating sales data for business context, to provide an overall behaviour ‘stickiness’ score, observed across the aforementioned groups.

Co-op have since used the findings to undertake a vast cascade across their businesses and made actionable recommendations to stakeholders from entry level to exec level, to steer business decisions as the UK looks ahead to our roadmap back to normal life. They are now seeing more and more pieces saying the same things identified last year – so they got it right!

This project was fascinating, inspiring, challenging and intriguing – trying to answer the question that is on everyone’s mind, as accurately and robustly as possible while avoiding bias and misleading responses! Join us for the intriguing learnings from this complex quant project, including:

• Circumstantial vs emotional behaviour changes
• Whose behaviour has changed the most
• The future of online shopping
• The shopping behaviours that have changed for good

Matt will be sharing Co-op’s considerations on various interesting and progressive methodologies, and why they landed on the one they chose, giving them greater confidence in understanding the future compared to a standard research project.

Plus, he will reveal the 3 mega-factors underlying post-lockdown behaviour change, that everyone will be able to relate to!

Then we’ll have 15 minutes of discussion and networking in small groups, to reflect on what we’ve heard, chat with the speakers and to reconnect with our fellow &more members.

Places are strictly limited to 50 attendees to ensure the best environment for discussion and networking.

Don’t miss this month’s fascinating Lunchtime Bite!