Developing a Digital Application for Visualizing Pop-up Retail Activities around the World through Social Media
Team Members: Hong Yu, Sean Sedlezky, Anatoliy Gruzd
Students: Jordan Kilfoy, Rahi Tajzadeh, Chelsea Heney, Jessie Dong
Pop-up shops are temporary stores that “pop up” for a few days or months. Retailers of all sizes have implemented pop-up shops – from global and national retail chains, small independent stores, to ecommerce pure players – and have positioned these initiatives as a marketing & communication tool, as incubators to test the market and/or new products, or as inventory liquidation venues. Pop-up shops have also been established as a solution for revitalizing communities where significant storefront vacancies exist.
This project aims to develop a digital application for visualizing pop-up retail activities worldwide through search and mining of social media data.
We plan to utilize the various multimedia content that is available through Web-based sharing and community services (such as Instagram) and develop a customized digital application of pictures and texts of pop-up operations mapping to specific geographic locations on maps of regions and a visualized pop-up event calendar featuring various cities in Canada and major cities in the world.
The application developed will provide dynamic text and visual content to facilitate more active engagement of diverse stakeholders. Specifically, it will provide a global view of pop-up activities around the country in specific product categories, time, geographic locations (city and areas of cities), and what businesses/pop-up agencies are active in the field. International examples in major cities will provide pop-up retail operation examples for local businesses looking for best practices and inspirations.