Sports science kicks off retail sea-change

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Sports science kicks off retail sea-change.

Shopper Retail Insight (SRI) is using the same sophisticated analytics used for assessing player performance in Premiership, Championship and Major League football clubs to deliver factual understanding of shopper behaviour.  This innovative research tool offers retailers and brand owners an unmatched level of insight in rapid time.

VentureAxis, the sister company to SRI, is a provider of this type of analytical technology to football all over the World.  Drawing on the same technological principles SRI has advanced the expertise so that, for the first time, it is possible to understand factually exactly how customers behave en-mass in an array of leading retail and/or brand environments.

Charles Offer, Director of Shopper Retail Insight explains, "This technology is tried, trusted and proven.  Distance, route and actions of footballers are very similar to distance, route and actions of shoppers.  How many seconds on the ball translates into how many seconds browsing a fixture.  This is not about watching individuals in a big-brother fashion but understanding patterns of shopper behaviour and producing tangible insights that benefit brands and retailers."

The SRI research tool, which delivers the same kind of information to bricks-and-mortar businesses as cookies do to internet sellers, is available in a choice of four core services; Store Scan – entire store research, CAT scan – category level insight, Service Scan – monitors staff interaction and Promo Scan – provides individual promotions monitoring.  Customers already utilising SRI include brands from more than 10 countries including P&G, Diageo and SABMiller and UK retailers including Tesco.

"Existing research techniques tell us what shopper's buy." says Charles.  "What we don't know is how shoppers behave when they are shopping.  What they actually do and just as importantly what they don't do.  I'd suggest that a retailer would want to know if they were losing £75m of revenue per year due to shoppers abandoning the check-out queue."

Using inconspicuous digital recording equipment, the Group analyses over 500,000 hours of sports and retail video every year.  Group processing centres around the world handle huge quantities of captured data for SRI and harvest quality-controlled, confidential and detailed insight far more quickly than with existing research options.  The outputs which include heat-map imaging are generated in weeks rather than not months.
All SRI data is extracted from real-time and the actual physical volume of store footfall rather than a limited or restricted sample

"SRI operates in the real-world not the sample-research-world.  Consumers behave differently when they are being researched and traditional in-store methods are constrained by the limitations of how many shoppers it is possible to accompany."  Says Charles.