After a short hiatus, I am delighted to announce that our field research team is back in action and working cautiously to resume collecting data on the GB retail and leisure landscape.
Our ability to get back into the field has been facilitated by the hard work of our Operations and Insight departments who have spent time designing a careful plan with a range of measures to both protect our field researchers and to continue to do our bit to contain the spread of Coronavirus.
This includes:
- Covering the cost of any PPE equipment used by our team.
- Prioritising locations our researchers feel comfortable visiting, so a mixture of cities and smaller towns.
- Our Scottish and Welsh researchers being led by national restrictions.
- Researchers are surveying local areas to keep travel to a minimum.
- All data is collected without entering any premises.
During the pause in field research, our Operations department significantly bolstered their desk-based research to ensure that we continued to be able to report on the initial impact immediately post lockdown. However, resuming our field work means that over the coming weeks we will obtain a first-hand picture of the impact this pandemic is having on the retail market and will be able to track this over the medium and long term.
Over the coming weeks and months we remain committed to supporting our clients through this period of uncertainty and have developed new metrics to deliver the insights which are more critical now than ever.
Please see a comment below from Head of Retail and Strategic Partnerships, Lucy Stainton.
“With so many questions coming in from across the industry regarding the impacts of COVID-19, we are delighted that we have been able to get the team safely back into the field to capture both the short term impacts as well as how quickly economic activity is recovering by area.
There will be some fascinating and critical insights coming through on how each market varies in terms of resilience which will be instrumental for retailers, landlords and local government in helping inform a short and medium term strategic response to this pandemic.
Over the past few weeks, we have been working on the operator side on portfolio re-opening strategy, using multiple datapoints to quantify which stores will see higher levels of footfall and recovery and which sites should therefore be prioritised. We are also gearing up to support investors, landlords and operators with a post-lockdown portfolio scan to show how each of the markets they are invested in look post-COVID and therefore how the strengths and weaknesses within each portfolio might have shifted. If we can help your business in any way please don’t hesitate in getting in touch”
If you have any questions regarding our field research work during the pandemic, please feel free to contact me or any member of the team.
Best wishes and stay safe,
Barnaby
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