The business question
Morrisons was developing its Store of the Future formats at Kirkstall and Wrexham. The question was commercial: did the new layouts help customers find and buy what they needed, and where were opportunities being missed?
Sales data could show what sold. It could not explain which areas shoppers never reached, what they considered and rejected, or how one part of the store affected another. M-Vision made those behaviours visible.
Follow the whole journey
The programme grew from filming the Market Street fresh-food area at Kirkstall into analysis across the store. I developed the behavioural coding software and built the analytical delivery capability, managing a team of video analysts and connecting the evidence to the retailer’s questions.
We tracked routes, category visits, dwell time, product interactions and selections. Heatmaps and customer-flow analysis showed how people used the store; category reports connected that movement to shopping and purchase behaviour.
The March 2012 comparison drew on 5,890 shopper journeys across Kirkstall and Wrexham, recorded between November 2011 and March 2012. Looking across the whole trip meant we could examine category performance in context, rather than treat each fixture as an isolated sales opportunity.
A good-looking layout could still hide categories
Wrexham’s open fresh-food area gave customers several routes through the store. The analysis showed how destination categories pulled people towards the back, allowing them to bypass other fresh departments. Kirkstall’s more sequential layout encouraged a different pattern of exposure.
The practical question became: were customers rejecting a category, or simply not encountering it?
The recommendations considered signage, routes and the placement of products associated with different shopping missions. They gave the store-development team options to evaluate before committing to expensive layout changes.
Changing the offer did not guarantee changing behaviour
Work on pre-packed fish tested the assumption that removing products from the chiller would send shoppers to the staffed counter. Observations and customer discussions showed barriers around convenience, price uncertainty and the interaction itself.
In that analysis, little over 1% of shoppers who approached the pre-packed area and left without a purchase went on to shop the counter. The intended transfer was not reliably happening.
That was a different problem from weak demand for fish. It pointed to the importance of retaining a suitable way to buy, and of examining the effect of range changes on the whole customer experience.
Measure what happens after a change
The programme also followed changes over time. The January 2011 Oven Fresh summary reported average zone conversion of 28% after the changes, compared with 15% before. It also showed that the initial peak had fallen back in subsequent weeks and that customer groups responded differently.
This gave the team a more useful assessment than a single launch-week result: an observed improvement in the proportion buying within the zone, alongside questions about how the change worked for different shoppers. Zone conversion was the measure; it was not a store-wide sales or profit result.
What Morrisons gained
M-Vision supplied evidence for store-development and category decisions, with weekly reporting and more detailed analysis of specific commercial questions. It helped distinguish footfall from engagement, engagement from purchase, and a design intention from the behaviour it actually produced.
My contribution combined shopper research, analysis and the software needed to deliver it at scale. The technology made it possible to answer better business questions; the value lay in what the evidence enabled the team to decide.
For a retailer or supplier, the same principle applies today: understand where the purchase journey breaks down before spending on a new range, promotion or store execution.
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