Blazing Trails and Throwing Away Boxes: A Sprott PhD student Taking Chances

Meet Nada Elnahla—one of those people who has indeed thrown away the box. A genuine, brilliant, and talented woman, Nada is blazing trails while amassing a robust, eclectic, and free-thinking research program as she completes her PhD in marketing at Sprott.

Nada Elnahla is a PhD candidate at the Sprott School of Business under the supervision of Leighann Neilson.

Nada’s life and academic journey started in Egypt where she earned her PhD in comparative literature. But, after some years as an assistant professor in English literature at the Alexandria University, Nada and her family made the decision to immigrate to Canada—a move she knew would come with major sacrifices. One of them: she would have to rethink her career in academia. With few opportunities available in Canada to teach English literature at the post-secondary level, Nada was faced with the decision to learn a new discipline. She had to start from scratch.

Based on a series of events and people she knew, she was guided toward Dr. Leighann Neilson, Associate Professor in marketing at Sprott because Neilson was known to have a interdisciplinary approach to her research and Nada had some ideas of how to integrate her expertise in comparative literature into the marketing arena. Nada and Neilson met in a Starbucks café one afternoon, and by the end of the meeting it was a sealed deal—they clicked instantly and knew they would work well together. And so, marketing is where Nada has found a new passion and is excited to begin the data-collection phase of her research project. And, her project? It’s extremely interesting. Moreover, Nada is blazing trails in this area of marketing research and theory. In fact, her research area is so novel, she’s coined a new term to describe what it’s about: Retaillance. It means surveillance in the retail sector.

Nada’s research focuses on big chain retailers—the brick and mortar stores, such as Walmart, IKEA, Canadian Tire, and Loblaw as examples, and Nada was surprised to learn just how much surveillance happens within a retail setting. Surveillance can include what we all may expect, such as cameras and employees tracking our movement mainly for security reasons. But retailers are also tapping into the rapidly adapting and advancing technology and now surveillance can include anything from cooler doors displaying advertisements of frozen food that change depending on your age, sex, time of day, even your ethnicity; free WiFi that allows the store to track your movement through your phone; points cards gathering personal data; even facial recognition technology. One of the retailers Nada is including in her research, MANGO clothing, is introducing a new kind of surveillance where they’ve partnered with Vodaphone to create the digital fitting room: you don’t actually try on the clothes, instead, the augmented mirror simulates this process.

PhD Candidate Nada Elnahla (left) and her poster ‘Retail Consumers Are No Boiled Frogs’, with Leighann Neilson, Associate Professor of Marketing at Sprott.

Nada is approaching this area in a big picture, exploratory way; uncovering truths around retail surveillance where little is known. Through surveys and interviews with both consumers and retailers, Nada is elucidating what consumers know about retail surveillance, what they are willing to accept, as well, if consumers are aware of regulations and laws pertaining to retail surveillance. Moreover, Nada wants to understand if surveillance technology has a negative or positive effect on consumer behaviour—when will consumers accept, resist, or even negotiate with retailers’ surveillance strategies? There is significance in knowing all of this—both for the consumer and the retailer. A retailer knowing your shopping history and frequency, where you live and how much money you make, could result in vulnerabilities to the consumer and can ultimately lead to various kinds of discriminations, where retailers focus their marketing and advertising to a certain, more preferred kind of demographic. For retailers the risk comes in the form of trust. If consumers feel that retailers have tipped the scales too far and there is a feeling of personal violation or unfairness occurring, then that consumer may choose to shop elsewhere and the retailer has now lost customer loyalty and therefore, of course, revenue.

What’s really fascinating with this untapped area of marketing is that it is a double-edged sword of sorts. Retailers’ goal for surveillance is to keep their stores and customers safe, but also to create a positive and valuable shopping experience for customers. The ultimate question is: what amount of surveillance is too much? Nada sees her research expanding well beyond this initial project, such as working to help shape regulations and laws that are in sync with surveillance technology to help consumers have more informed shopping experiences—and so everyone can walk out of the store happy.

Nada has also adjusted her research framework to address the COVID-19 crisis—how will this change or modify consumers’ reactions and feeling toward surveillance? Will it push consumers to be more accepting—or rejecting—of extra safety measure and data collection? Concurrent to the surveillance research, Nada is actively collaborating with other faculty, cross-pollinating her expertise to look at how the fields of marketing and comparative literature can coexist. More specifically, Nada examines how managers can use scenarios from fictional literature to help navigate through issues with employees on sensitive issue such as mental health and drug addictions. Further to this, and apropos to her “throw-away-that-box” thinking, Nada is examining the end stage of marketing—the disposal of items—specifically in the context of how immigrants feel about disposing of their personal items when moving abroad, which introduces an additional emotional element because often disposal is out of necessity rather than desire.

Nada is a person who has taken an immense amount of talent (she’s also a highly-acclaimed classical pianist!), academic experience, and intellectual acumen to create such unique narratives within her research sphere—blazing trails and throwing away boxes. Even starting from scratch, Nada is already a highly-valuable scholar within the academic world—and beyond!