ISB Home  |  Professional Club Home

Retail Lab

Why Retail Lab
Retail, as a special interest area at the Indian School of Business (ISB), has been picking up steam over the last few years. Presently, owing to limited research in the area, data pertaining to the buying behaviour of customers, effect of promotions, effect of store design, etc, on retail sale, is inadequate.

ISB offers a test environment with merchandising opportunities and a diverse mix of student, staff, visitors, etc, to carry out various experiments. With Retail Lab, we would like to design and carry out field experiments, collect and analyze data, and generate meaningful insights on the retail market.

What a Retail Lab Can Do
ISB has in-store vendors for selling merchandise and various food and grocery outlets. Retail Lab can carry out following experiments:

• In-Store Design: Test effects on retail sales by doing in-store design changes

• Product and Theme Promotions: Measure effects on retail sales by promotions (branding)

• External Brands: Bring in external brands to study buying preferences on specific product categories - Flash sales

• Coupon Sales: Measure the effect of various types of coupon promotions (pre-sale, post sale, etc.)

• Moving forward, we may explore the idea of installing RFIDs in shopping baskets

How we Plan to Leverage the Above Experiments?
Retail Lab will collect demographic and other related data of purchasers to analyse the impact of experiments on sales, walk-ins and buying patterns. The insights could be validated by partnering with industry professionals and professors.

What are the Final Outcomes?
As a result of these experiments, we hope to see the following outcomes:

• Share the insights generated from the experiments with outside retailers for validation as well as application.

• Ensure that both students and professors leverage upon the experiments for research purposes.

• Introduce a section on outcomes of these experiments in the retail newsletter.

• Organise speaker sessions on the tried concepts and the patterns seen in the industry.

• Inititate field visits to see the application of tested concepts at the Retail Lab.

Overall, Retail Lab will work to design and implement experiments, collect and analyze data, work on validation and application of insights.