UROP Project

Influences of 360° Shop-Tours for the Hybrid Shopping Experience.

Digitalization offers many chances as well as challenges for local retailers and restaurants. The changing customer behavior requires the local retail to adapt new digital tools such as 360° video tours to bridge between presence and online shopping into a new form of hybrid retail. This requires new skills and adaptions from the shop owners. In the smart shopping project local retailers in Aachen realize their vision of a hybrid retail with a digital tool box. One of those toolboxes are 360° videos of the local shop. The research question within the UROP project is to evaluate how this tool supports the hybrid shopping experience and what skills sets are needed from the retailers to develop local customer engagement. Together with the city of Aachen, the Institute for Information Management in Mechanical Engineering (IMA) is developing and evaluating various digital tools for stationary retail and gastronomy. By means of the participatory research approach of the living laboratory, t

Task

You will get the chance to undertake your own research project in an interdisciplinary and international research team. The project is a great chance to discover the city of Aachen and thereby settled in a transdisciplinary and applied environment. It will be your task to research consumer behavior on an hybrid shopping platform. Your task is to describe and evaluate how 360° Shopping-Tours support hybrid retail with qualitative research methods depending on your own study field. Consequently, to develop a guidance based on your findings to support the skill sets of local retailers.

Requirements

Media, Sociology, Design, Communication Studies, Political Science, UX Studies, Economics