Simple Data Visualization for Retail

Recall I mentioned this effort here before.  Now a reminder from the HBR:

' ... “Retailers are all using scanner data to track what happened at the point of sale,” says Sam Hui, an associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “But they have no idea what’s really happening at a point-of-purchase decision.”

This is changing with the emergence of location analytics. Take Alex and Ani, which designs and retails jewelry, and Belk, a department store chain. Both have signed on with Prism Skylabs, a software company, to map in-store customer behavior.

By using a store’s existing security cameras, or installing new ones, Prism (no relation to the NSA program) is able to track the movement of a store’s customers and identify patterns.  “We’re not really looking at any individual; we’re looking at what a group of people over a period of time do,” says senior vice president of managed services Cliff Crosbie. “That’s the really big thing: Identifying what a volume of people do over a period of time, and how you read that information.” ... '