Behavioral tracking and optimization coming to a retail store near you…
In-store sensors and motion trackers will watch and track what you do in stores to help retailers and merchandisers optimize in-store experiences, packaging and store and shelf layout. It’s like combining Google Analytics + Microsoft’s Kinect’s motion-sensing software and using it to create usability labs in retail stores. Smart.
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal Spying on Your Buying, they reported…
“Merchandisers already track our cyber choices (efficiently, following the clicks on our keyboards) and our in-store decisions (inefficiently, with glum market researchers in every aisle). Now high-tech acuity is going offline. Soon, in-store sensors and motion trackers will watch your footsteps, see what your hands do, know when you hesitate—and when you don’t.”
Companies mentioned by The Wall Street Journal as specializing in this emerging area:
- “Shopper Tracker is a spatial recognition software, plus heat sensors and proprietary algorithms, analyze customer movements. It can show which store shelves are most popular, which items are most touched, which taken and then put back. “This is data visualization for decisions. The goal? To “optimize” stores the way that Google Analytics has optimized websites (you can find the balsamic more quickly; the store can sell more of it).
- Euclid, another start-up, measures Wi-Fi pings from smartphones and devices, both inside and outside a retailer, for $200 a month…He and his partners are meeting with investors, and brainstorming benefits beyond retail—in, say, education. Imagine if schools really understood how kids interact with what’s in the classroom. Yes, the whole world has become a usability lab.”
Added this news to the MarketingZone article on Retail Store Marketing Ideas
