NTRG creates Future Lab in response to poor research

Lorna Strickland

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Nordic Travel Retail Group creates Future Lab in response to poor research findings presented at the group's seminar earlier this year

 
 
 
The Nordic Travel Retail Group (NTRG) has created a working group called Future Lab. The lab will be a panel of ten to 20 travel-retail executives from the region who will specifically work on ways of targeting passengers and making them spend. If more than 20 individuals wish to join, NTRG is willing to discuss official expansion of the lab.
 
The idea sprung from the Nordic Travel Retail Group's annual seminar, which showed findings from research company Kjaer and Schmeltzer that the group deemed less than positive. Of the 10,000 interviews conducted specifically about passenger attitudes to travel-retail at the four key airports in the region-Stockholm Arlanda, Oslo International, Copenhagen Kastrup and Helsinki Vantaa airports, 37-47% admitted they spent less in 2006 than they did in 2005. About 19-32% responded that they would spend less on travel-retail purchases in future, about 50% admitted they found travel-retail pricing "reasonably attractive" and 15-48% revealed they found travel-retail "unattractive, or slightly attractive".
 
The group responded with "this is not good enough" and as a result delivered what it promised it would at the seminar earlier this year. "We felt compelled to take action," revealed NTRG chairman Erik Thomsen. "We will work on the generation of ideas and development of new concepts and markets."
 
The founders of the initiative have vowed to investigate, develop and test new concepts for shop layouts, category managment and marketing. It will raise general levels of knowlede with the region's travel retailers by gleaning information from the domestic market and will be charged with defining problems and finding solutions. The group is encouraging those members who wish to participiate in driving forward Nordic, Baltic and Scandinavian regional travel-retail activity to come forward and join Future Lab.
 
"Participation in Future Lab is aimed at ambitious companies within the industry, who are interested in doing their bit to help determine the way forward for the industry," said Thomsen. Participation requires a comittment of ten hours each month and membership to NTRG. A position on the committee costs Eu2,700 ($3,379).