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Marketing Consultant:

Good morning. Welcome to this talk on Space Management.

And today I'm going to look particularly at space management in the supermarket.

Now since the time supermarkets began, marketing consultants, like us, have been gathering information about customers' shopping habits.

To date, various research methods have been used to help promote the sales of supermarket products.

There is, for example, the simple and direct questionnaire Examph which provides information from customers about their views on displaysand Q33 products and then helps retailers make decisions about what to put where.

Another method to help managers understand just how shoppers go around their stores are the hidden television cameras that film us as we shop and monitor Q34 our physical movement around the supermarket aisles: where do we

start, what do we buy last, what attracts us, etc.

More sophisticated techniques now include video surveillance and such devices as the eye movement recorder. This is a device which shoppers volunteer to wear Q35 taped into a headband, and which traces their eye movements as

they walk round the shop recording the most eye-catching areas of shelves and aisles.

But with today's technology. Space Management is now a highly sophisticated method of manipulating the way we shop to ensure maximum profit.

Supermarkets are able to invest millions of pounds in powerful computers which tell them what sells best and where.

Now, an example of this is Spaceman which is a computer program that helps Q36 the retailer to decide which particular product sells best in which part of the store.

Now Spaceman works by receiving information from the electronic checkouts (where customers pay) on how well a product is selling in a particular position.

Spaceman then suggests the most profitable combination of an article and its Q37 position in the store.