Scenarios like this one are becoming more and more common as location tech gains a foothold in retail:
You’ve just tossed a jar of peanut butter in your grocery cart when your smartphone buzzes. You glance down at the screen to see a message that seems downright clairvoyant: Buy some jelly. Get $1 off.
Convenient? Certainly. Creepy? Maybe.
In September, Apple introduced the iBeacon. But retailers are exploring many other options for indoor positioning and tracking, including low-power Bluetooth (used by the iBeacon and others), videocameras, sound waves, and magnetic fields. The goal is to enhance the brick and mortar experience to rival that of online retailers.
The technology could eventually give retailers capabilities rivaling those of online stores. On the Web, behavioral ads use records of a person’s browsing history to propose products. Now pharmacies or home improvement stores wanting to sell Kleenex or two-by-fours could soon do the same thing (see “It’s All E-Commerce Now”).
“Not much is known about what shoppers do in stores until they check out at the cashier,” says Todd Sherman, chief marketing officer for Point Inside, a Bellevue, Washington, startup that’s among a score of companies that have raised venture capital funding to perfect indoor tracking and advertising techniques. “This way, you can see what they’re interested in [and] see where they’re going.”
The data culled from shopper cell phones can be incredibly useful.
Forest City Enterprises triangulates on cellular signals to monitor foot traffic in most of the nearly 20 shopping centers it owns or manages. It says the data helped it decide where to move an escalator that was interfering with an entrance. The company also measures how long visitors stay after a fashion show or concert. Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, Forest City’s vice president of digital strategy, says the company wants to know, “Do they get one soda, hop in the car, and leave? Or are they staying longer?” In the future, foot-traffic data could be used to set lease prices, she says.
There is an obvious convenience to buying online. But brick and mortar has benefits as well and traditional retailers are focusing on enhancing the experiences storefronts offer that cannot be matched by online merchants.