Chipping away at shoppers' psyches
Ariana Eunjung Cha The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
Marketers hail technology, but customers worry about privacy
NEW YORK At Prada's flagship store in SoHo, Ellen Lindhart was checking out a shimmery blue jacket with a large collar and a low-hanging belt. As she pulled it off the rack and headed to a dressing room, the haute couture was checking her out, too. A tiny silicon chip inside a black envelope attached by string to the garment transmitted a signal to a computer in the store's back room that logged the movement. The computer, in turn, sent a command to a flat-screen monitor near where Lindhart was standing in the dressing room. The monitor showed an image of the jacket she was trying on, complete with details about its cut, fabric and color.
"Hmm . . .," she mumbled as she slipped her arms into the jacket - puzzled, she said later, about how the computer knew so much.
The Prada shop is wiring itself to be a virtual laboratory for studying shoppers' psyches. It now knows the exact location of every outfit in the store. Soon, for those who sign up for Prada's customer loyalty program, the shop will keep track of what they try on and what they end up buying. It used to be that retailers who wanted to know what people thought about store displays, packages or shopping experiences would just ask, stopping consumers on their way out or inviting them for focus groups. Now technology allows retailers to better conduct "observational" research - that is, clandestinely study consumers in their habitat as they might animals in the wild.
The trendy design house is among hundreds of companies that in recent months have begun experimenting with new technologies to peek in on consumers. There are "gaze-tracking" systems that monitor how long a person stared at a particular part of a shelf, so displays that do not seem to inspire shoppers can be quickly rearranged. Electronic sensors count the number of shoppers in particular areas, helping stores deploy staff better.
"Very often what people do is very different from what they say," said Bill Abrams, founder of HouseCalls, a company that specializes in what he calls "retail ethnography." By observing shoppers when they are unaware they are being observed, he said, "You often get a stronger idea of motivation."
Paco Underhill, founder of a behavior research concern called Envirosell, said this kind of research is critically important today, as the average time shoppers now spend in a store is down to its lowest point ever: 11.27 minutes for buyers and 2.36 minutes for non-buyers. Given that 60 percent to 70 percent of purchases are impulse buys, Underhill said, it is crucial for stores to watch customers to figure out what is capturing their attention.
Many projects are being done quietly because retailers fear a backlash from privacy-minded customers.
ShopperTrak RCT, a high-tech analysis company, has set up monitoring devices in more than 10,000 retail outlets, including Nike, Eddie Bauer, Ikea, Sears and Disney stores. The system employs camera-like devices that feed images to computers for analysis.
Right now the technology can only count heads. In about nine months, companies should be able to upgrade to a system that will conduct more sophisticated tracking by identifying people by height, said ShopperTrak's president, Tad Shepperd.
The wanderings of people's eyes - what they bound over, where they linger - have also become of great interest to companies.
Thomas Hutchinson, a professor at the University of Virginia and Cambridge who developed an eye-tracking system called ERICA, said that while few companies have deployed such technologies in stores, many are testing them in laboratories.
Procter Gamble wanted to discern the best place for big boxes of Tide laundry detergent on supermarket shelves. It used the system and discovered that customers tend to look toward the ground for jumbo detergent containers rather than at middle or top shelves.
The technology with the greatest implications for retailing research may be the e-tag chips attached to merchandise such as the clothes at Prada. Gap, Toys 'R' Us, Bloomingdale's, J. Crew, Hollywood Video and a slew of other stores are also testing the tags.
Touted as the next-generation bar code, e-tag chips are much more sophisticated than the paper-and-ink labels.
They are the size of a postage stamp and are capable of storing and sending wireless signals with information such as the product name, when and where it was manufactured, its location, directions for use, and its expiration date.
At the two-story Prada store at Broadway and Prince Street in Lower Manhattan, the e-tags record all kinds of information: a garment's location within the store, how many times it has been tried on, how many of its kind are in stock.
Digital monitors displaying items a particular customer might want are nestled between racks of merchandise. Sales associates carry mobile computers, or "wands," that can read the e-tags. The doors on the dressing rooms have scanners that record when merchandise enters or exits.
Since the Prada shop opened on Dec. 15, information has been collected without identifying specific customers. But soon the company plans to introduce a program that will link the data to customers who want to participate.
Bruce Eckfeldt, a manager at IconNicholson, which designed the software for the project, said Prada has informed customers of the tracking and has been careful to collect personal information only from customers who consent.
Lynn Gross, a Prada customer, said she did not mind the surveillance if it meant better service. "Nowadays you can't do anything without being watched," shrugged Gross, 51.
But another frequent Prada customer, Jennifer Yoder, 29, said the idea of all that watching and tracking made her stomach turn.
"I'm in the 'freaked out' category when it comes to the amount of data that is out there on me that is captured and sold," Yoder said. |
