Three retailers, three countries, two months, one consistent result: 843 store sellers went through nonplusultra-run product training between July and August 2026, and the gamified sessions outperformed the classic slide-deck briefing on every measure we track. Currys ran 40 sessions for 439 staff across the United Kingdom in five days in July, and staff feedback ranked the sessions among the top three training days of the year. Fnac Darty ran 48 sessions for 275 sales associates in France that same month, built around an interactive Men in Black theme, and attendees rated the day 9.75 out of 10. Harvey Norman trained 129 sellers in Dublin in August, using the same gamified toolkit.
The sample is now large enough to say plainly what changes when training becomes a competition instead of a briefing. Sellers who go through the gamified format attend more willingly, remember more of the product story, and ask when the next session is, instead of waiting to be told to attend.
We ran all three programmes ourselves, so this is not a summary of someone else's fieldwork. The Currys sessions built in team competition and prizes. The Fnac Darty day wrapped the same core product content in a themed, interactive format. Harvey Norman's teams in Dublin worked through the gamified tools we use across our retail training programmes in Europe. None of the three needed a new curriculum, only a different format for delivering the same product knowledge.
The Numbers Are Consistent Across Three Different Retail Cultures
Currys, Fnac Darty, and Harvey Norman are not the same kind of retailer. Currys plc operates 691 stores across six European countries, mostly big-box electronics formats. Fnac Darty runs close to 1,500 stores worldwide across a multi-format mix of city-centre electronics, appliances, and cultural-goods stores. Harvey Norman's Irish stores sell electronics alongside furniture and homeware, a different shopping context again. Three languages, three store formats, three shopping cultures, and the same result: sellers who go through the gamified format score the session higher, retain more, and want the next one. That consistency is what tells us the mechanic works, not the moment.
Competition and a Theme Consistently Beat the Product Deck
None of these sessions replaced product content with entertainment. They kept the same information sellers need on the floor and changed how it arrives. At Currys, teams competed for prizes across the five-day rollout. At Fnac Darty, wrapping the material in a Men in Black theme turned a mandatory afternoon into the highest-rated session we ran for that retailer this year: 9.75 out of 10. A parallel training programme we run for a leading chipmaker's EMEA retail education initiative shows the same pattern from a different data set: 375 sessions and roughly 7,000 trainees so far in 2026, running 30 to 34% ahead of target.
This lines up with what a larger academic study of gamified training found in a corporate setting. Ryan Buell of Harvard Business School, Wei Cai of Columbia Business School, and Tatiana Sandino of Harvard Business School tracked KPMG's gamified training platform across 24 offices over 29 months and found the performance gains were largest where employees arrived already engaged, and where senior client-facing leaders took part themselves rather than leaving the platform to junior staff. Our field data says the same thing from the shop floor: the format works best where the store's own team leaders join in, not just attend.
Most of a Chipmaker's EMEA Training Programme Still Happens in Person
Of that same chipmaker programme's 375 sessions this year, 62% were delivered face-to-face rather than remotely. That is a deliberate choice, not a legacy habit. Remote and self-paced formats work for the parts of a curriculum that are pure information transfer. They do not replicate what happens when a trainer runs a live objection-handling round with the sellers who will use it on a customer that afternoon. The retention advantage in the Currys, Fnac Darty, and Harvey Norman numbers comes from the same source: a room, a competition, and immediate feedback, not a course completed alone at a screen.
The Retailer and the Brand Get Different Things From the Same Session
Here is the distinction most training budgets miss. The retailer gets a motivated floor. Sellers who look forward to training days build a stronger relationship with the store than sellers who endure them, and that shows up in staff retention and in how the retailer talks about a brand internally. The brand gets something else: recommendation share at the shelf, because a seller who remembers the product story after the gamified session is the seller who reaches for that product first when a customer asks what they would recommend. I would rather fund one gamified training day that a seller asks to repeat than five mandatory briefings that get the same information across on paper. The first changes what happens at the shelf. The second changes what a compliance report says.
nonplusultra's training work sits inside the same discipline that has run targeted training for Shokz's in-store staff across MediaMarkt, Saturn, and Fnac since 2019: training built for the specific brand story, not a generic briefing, is what lets retail staff articulate a brand's difference convincingly enough to close a sale.
▸Measure training the way a retailer measures a store, not the way a compliance team measures a course: a 9.75/10 session score and a top-three ranked training day are the metric, not attendance alone.
▸Build competition and a theme into the format before building a new curriculum. The product content sellers need rarely changes; how it arrives is what determines whether it sticks.
▸Get store team leaders into the room, not just their teams. The Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School study of KPMG and our own field results agree on this point: leader participation is what multiplies the gain from gamified training.
▸Keep the majority of training face-to-face if the goal is a live sales conversation, and reserve remote and self-paced formats for the parts of the curriculum that are pure information transfer.
If you are building or scaling a retail staff training programme across Europe, our training and education service runs the full learning system: content strategy, train-the-trainer certification, and in-store rep activation, measured on a Training NPS of 93 across more than 2,000 sessions a year.