Leveraging Emerging In-Store Technologies

Steven Keith Platt
Platt Retail Institute
February 1, 2012




The digital signage industry continues to grow, despite a challenging economic climate. Industry verticals such as financial institutions, out-of-home, and higher education are increasing their use of digital signs. Yet retail adoption of digital signs continues to lag. There are many reasons for this. Cost is a major impediment of course. But beyond the financial considerations, there are more fundamental issues that continue to challenge retailers. Those to be considered in this article include a lack of understanding of how to leverage technology to enhance content relevancy and impact, and how to integrate digital signs with other emerging in-store technologies. 

Technology is what makes a digital network a unique customer-facing medium. That is because a network has the ability to deliver timely, relevant messaging to consumers’ in-store. The more relevant the message, the more likely the customer is to respond. But today, these networks barely come close to reaching their potential. Most networks are running continuous closed loops, and fail to even leverage the ability to day-part. But the industry will evolve through technology that will enable the creation of relevant messaging that will deliver better results. PRI has developed a model for retailers to follow to begin to address this. It is termed Behavioral Merchandising (BEM). In summary, BEM establishes a content systemization model to illustrate how information can be accumulated and processed to produce digitally delivered messages to cause a desired consumer behavior.

Behavioral Merchandising is defined as the methodology for understanding, predicting, and influencing consumer purchase behavior in-store by messages delivered via a digital appliance. The objective of BEM is to stimulate the consumer buying process by mass-customization of targeted messages. The BEM process involves collecting and analyzing data via mathematical models for the extraction of customer/merchandise relationships, and to further predict consumer response to targeted promotions. Moreover, BEM is an ongoing, enhanced process that coordinates content and continues to learn based upon in-store consumer purchase behavior, as well as from additional knowledge insights. The output includes strategies and processes for creating and distributing targeted advertising messages to enhance customer relationships and promotional effectiveness.