To take place in a local supermarket some time soon. Actor 1 takes cereal from the middle shelf and then decides not to have it and places it on the lower shelf. Actor 2 takes cereal from the bottom shelf and then decides not to have it and places it in the space on the middle shelf. This happens as surreptitiously as possible. Eventually the whole landscape of this section of shelving is changed. Photo documentation before and after with an account of the experiment in between.
Interesting article of product placement.
Shelf Staking part 2
Went to Tescos the other day and set about the task of shelf staking with my son and boyfriend. We moved one stack of spaghetti to the space of another. I'm going to present all this in one pice with a text about the process. I'll post it here when its all sorted but for now here are a few pics of before and after.
Draft explaination
Shelf Staking Intervention
Venue: Tescos, Chester
Date: Saturday 19th February
Aim: To highlight the ideas behind product placement within supermarkets and question the effects that this may have on our shopping behaviours.
Objectives: To move the value spaghetti up onto the eye line level shelf.
To move the Heinz Spaghetti down onto the lower shelf
Script:
Actor 1 takes spaghetti from the middle shelf and then decides not to have it and places it on the lower shelf. Actor 2 takes spaghetti from the bottom shelf and then decides not to have it and places it in the space on the middle shelf. This happens as surreptitiously as possible. Eventually the whole landscape of this section of shelving is changed. Photo documentation before and after with an account of the experiment in between.
Documentation:
The actors were Beth Barlow, George Evans and Simon Kennedy. The intervention took around half an hour to complete. It was initially anticipated that cereal would be used but the variable sizes and the way that it was shelved made this impossible.
Findings:
There is less need than we thought to be surreptitious as there are very few people watching the behaviour of others in a supermarket. Only security guards watching from afar for shop lifting behaviours or for a fraction of a minute those whom we get in the way of. By the end of the intervention Beth had started to rearrange the products more like a shelf stacker than a shopper, rotating the cans to face out and changing the price tags around to correspond wit the new placement.
To look objectively at a shop with no intent to buy is at once difficult and interesting.
After changing the products a mother and child came up and rapidly chose from the eye level shelf, this now contained the value product.
The products remained in their new place at least until the following day at which point we stopped watching them.
George began to act. He placed bread in his basket and developed ideas about his characters tea intentions.
Idea of becoming an unofficial supermarket artist in residence. Performing a series of actions within a certain place. Thinking of how you can highjack the systems of real life in the same way a hacker hacks computers.
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