Category: Retail

Retail Shopping Analysis Using Beacons

There’s a recent paper on Analyzing of Gender Behaviors from Paths Using Process Mining: A Shopping Mall Application (pdf).

The authors use a ‘process mining’ algorithm to look at infrequent and incomplete data from a beacon event log. They analysed 642 customer paths of which 165 were male and 477 female. These were beacons people voluntarily carried as part of the study, not Bluetooth from their smartphones.

Customer journeys

The aim was to determine popular store groups, duration of visits and customer behaviour. They learnt that male customers had a loop between clothing-catering and clothing-supermarket. Female customers had a clothing-catering loop. Customers who spent more time in catering spent less time in clothing and vice versa. Male customers visited fewer store groups and visited stores in an unplanned way. Catering and clothing were the most popular store groups depending on the time (of year)

The paper concludes that Bluetooth is a cost-effective tracking technology that provides unbiased and uninfluenced observations.

Resurgence of Beacons in Retail

The demise of Google Nearby prompted some commentators to declare the death of beacons. However, here at BeaconZone we are actually seeing a resurgence of the use of beacons in retail.

Gone are the unsolicited notifications and gone are the ‘get rich quick’ marketers. The scenarios that remain tend to use beacons as an adjunct to something else rather than being the main solution itself. For example, they are used to provide triggering in CloseComm‘s WiFi onboarding app used by Subway, McDonalds, BurgerKing and CircleK and NCR.

Beacons are being rolled out to many food retailers, particularly in the USA. They are also taking new physical forms as witnessed by Mr Beacon:

If you are looking for more innovative uses of beacons in retail, take a look at Alibaba’s Fashion AI concept store as mentioned in the latest Wired (UK):

RFID and Beacons are used to detect items picked up during shopping so that customers can collect what they have looked at, have accessories automatically selected and view what’s in stock. Once they are home, a virtual wardrobe allows customers to buy anything they saw in store.

Beacons can also be used to enable audit compliance. Eric West, Head of Strategy at IMS has a useful free pdf on takeaways from GroceryShop, the retail industry conference. The pdf also mentions the use of beacons in lighting to drive location-based messages and wayfinding. Also:

“Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of WholeFoods was a “tipping point” that ensured all grocery players were speeding up their digital plans.”

Read about Beacons for Marketing

Using Beacons in Retail

We get many queries from retailers asking how to use beacons. As we have previously written, Beacons aren’t much good for unsolicated marketing (nor are Eddystone beacons) and instead you need to think about offering useful information on top of which you can then provide offers.

There’s a Twitter post by Joaquim Bretcha today that shows how Tesco Lotus use iBeacons in Thailand:

You can see that their app does a lot more than push offers. It gently prompts the user at the appropriate times through notifications, in-app messages and sms messages. The aim is to have “Constant exposure to Tesco media”, not push offers.

Consequences of the Narrow Focus On Retail

Venture Beat has a great article by Kyle Fugere of dunnhumby Ventures on “Why indoor location tech is facing an uphill battle” where he says most beacon/platform providers have focussed on retail and consequently the:

“Refined focus has considerably shrunk the market opportunity for these companies”

He encourages companies to be

“more creative in regards to use cases”

and think about

“Banking, transportation, and live events with a potentially greater need and significantly shorter sales cycle”

We agree. Too many solutions tie beacons with a marketing platform. Also, one beacon type doesn’t fit all scenarios. One marketing platform certainly can’t fit all usecases. For example, a marketing platform isn’t suitable for security and sensing (IoT) applications.

The preponderance of beacon-based marketing platforms has obscured and confused what beacons actually are, due to over emphasis of the retail business benefits or description of proprietary server side CMS features. Many clients coming to us are actually confused.

The excessive competition in retail has caused beacon companies to have to run very lean. There’s noone to really talk to and even if you do get to talk to someone they only know about the benefits but can’t provide technical advice on how to solve your requirements.

Good business is all about listening to customers and adapting solutions. Most current platform providers can’t do that as most have trapped themselves with sparse human resources, narrow technical systems and very restricted ranges of beacon hardware.

Our site provides articles and a wide range of beacons to allow you to take advantage of beacons in scenarios outside traditional retail marketing and into new areas such as banking, security, transportation, distribution, sensing and the Internet of Things.