Know Your Retail Customers Through a Sixth Sense

One sensor, multiple metrics

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Radar Sensors

June 2022 – The utilization of technology has become a catalyst for change in retail in order to meet the changes in consumer expectations, thus reshaping the retail landscape. Envisioning the future of retail, Meiyume is pleased to announce the release of a radar sensor that can passively capture anonymous consumer data with actionable intelligence through radio waves. This comes with multiple benefits to remotely measure and report shopper engagement, providing brand owners and retailers a deeper understanding of the complete consumer journey and their store performance.

Understanding Shoppers’ Behaviour

In this era of retailing, the fundamental model of a store has surpassed the ‘archaic’ approach of mere transactions and moved into a hub of innovation – the crux of new retail, a concept coined by Alibaba Chairman, Jack Ma. Alongside the global digital transformation, many retailers are adopting smart retail solutions that utilises real-time data to make informed business decisions. As such, retailers are able to understand the consumer’s behaviour to create a personalised shopping experience that ultimately increases loyalty and sales revenue.

According to Microsoft, organisations that leverage consumer behaviour data to generate insights tend to outperform competitors by 85% in terms of sales growth. By implementing the insights effectively, retailers can significantly enhance the consumer experience. This increase in consumer experience is estimated by Microsoft to generate an average revenue of USD$775million over 3 years for companies with USD$1billion annual revenue. Furthermore, 94% of retailers are already investing in technology to improve analytics, the majority being in-store sensors with 49% (figure 1).

As most retailers are attempting to collect consumer data, many are still gathering them in silos. This leads to a ‘data rich, insights poor’ problem. On top of that, country-specific privacy laws coupled with consumers’ distrust in data collection have posed a major hindrance to many retailers who are heading towards this trajectory. Hence, retailers are faced with the pressure to strategize a robust data management strategy. A study by Harvard Business Review (HBR) created a framework to address the purpose and direction of data management through two approaches – data defense and data offense. Essentially, data defense is to minimize risk, for instance, ensuring data management is in compliance with the relevant regulations. Data offense is focused on increased revenue through activities that generate insights, most often through interactive dashboards.

Although many companies trade-off between the defensive and offensive approach, Meiyume has sought to combine both with the design of our radar sensor. The combination of anonymous data collection with our insights dashboard allows brands and retailers to optimize their data strategy on an offense-defense spectrum, with more emphasis on the offensive approach for retailers.

Capabilities

Each radar sensor comes in a compact square shape measuring less than 7cm. Due to its small size, the sensors can be easily concealed behind fixtures and functional displays since the radio waves are able to penetrate most non-reflective materials; allowing for flexibility in placement and simple installation without compromising on the aesthetics of the fixtures. This feature ensures the utmost privacy for consumers since no cameras and mobile tracking are used. Therefore, consumer data is captured anonymously with no personal information being collected.

The sensor’s proximity coverage is customisable whereby its users can pre-set various zones to segment consumer behaviour, such as foot traffic and dwell time, at the point-of-sale display. Retailers and brands can then access these real-time data via Meiyume’s dashboard to gain valuable insights about the consumer behaviour in front of their display. Coupled with sales data, key performance indicators can be identified through the conversion and interaction rate. This allows retailers and brands to understand the effectiveness of their displays and visual merchandising.

Meiyume

As technology has become a strategic imperative for brand owners & retailers, this innovation reinforces the integrity of Meiyume’s retail solutions by helping clients better understand their consumers and measure their return on investment.