Our electronic footprints!

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I wrote earlier about data privacy issues and how customers are willing sometimes to share data with marketers in return for specific benefits. What about data which gets picked up without you even knowing about it? Scary right!!

Nick Gonzalez has this interesting comment about this fascinating company:

Path Intelligence is a U.K. based company that monitors foot traffic in a rather ingenious way, through customers’ cell phones. Periodically our cell phones ping the nearby cell towers basically saying “Here I am”. Path Intelligence has built receivers that detect these signals and triangulate the owner’s location with accuracy of up to a meter.

Path Intelligence can then map these signals and track anonymous customers as they move around and answer questions about the store’s layout through online reports. Where are the bottle necks? Where do customer’s spend the most time. How many customers browse and go?

Here is my take:

1. This would be a fascinating way to analyse footfall within a store. It might lead to a better way of staffing different departments within a store. Or even locating another cashier till!
2. Imagine how this can be used effectively to understand which part of an exhibition or conference was visited more. Check this out: http://www.slideshare.net/brady/where-20-path-intelligence
3. Look at the rich analytics that you can do by marrying the footfall data with conversions within the store(cash memos per footfall)