US retailers are looking for places where people buy and sleep – Tech News



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Retailers find all kinds of uses for customers' phone location data.

Hill Country Galleria, in Bee Cave, Texas, used this information to determine that a large number of buyers owned pets. He installed fountains, childcare stations and Santa Claus photo shoots for his four-legged friends. Shopping mall shopping time has increased by 40%, according to CBRE Group Inc.

A Chicago mall discovered that it attracted customers from Asian neighborhoods. He decided to fill a vacant position with an upscale Asian grocer.

Dunkin 'Brands Group Inc., which opened 278 new donut shops in the United States last year, used telephone data to ensure that new stores would not siphon customers from existing sites.

Retailers are following the trail of electronic breadcrumbs left by millions of customers. And that helps them at a time when the industry is suffering.

They buy mobile phone data that lets you know where and how long people buy, eat, watch movies – and where they go before and after. This allows them to determine the personal details that describe who the consumers are. This helps them to choose the types of stores to open and how to advertise.

The information is transforming the company. And this raises issues of confidentiality.

The idea of ​​being monitored by companies worries some people. All the companies surveyed as part of this story stated that they chose not to use information to identify individuals. But most of the time, they use a system of honor, because the rules governing the data remain relatively lax.

Location data

This practice is called location badysis. Globally, the sector is expected to reach US $ 15 billion (US $ 61.99) by 2023, up from US $ 8.35 billion in 2017, according to the Placer.ai mobile data company. More than half of the retailers surveyed last year said they badociate with third-party companies to collect location data.

This is far from the time when shopping center owners were drawing concentric circles on a map to determine where to advertise.

"Historically, we've only been able to look at people's theoretical behavior," said Alan McKeon, President and CEO of Alexander Babbage Inc., which aggregates and sells location data. "We can now see where we actually get, and we found that the commercial areas looked nothing like what we thought before."

Deposit pins

Phone apps collect user data throughout the day, placing thumbtacks on locations and collecting latitudes, longitudes, time stamps, and device IDs. Aggregators, such as UberMedia Inc, buy the information and sell it to badysis companies such as Alexander Babbage who clean it up so retail owners can use it. According to Mr. McKeon, his company usually pays six digits for the data, while retail packages cost only $ 15,000 (RMR 61,995).

UberMedia reports that it monitors 800 million active devices a month, which totals 14,000 billion site observations and 4.5 years of historical data.

For details, including age, income, ethnicity, education level, number of children, and more, businesses badociate the evening venue with the telephone with US Census data.

"We do not have any information about the owner of the device, so we contextualize the information based on where the phone sleeps at night," McKeon said.

Location data is not the only thing followed. There is also psychographic data, which includes a person's behavior and habits of consumption and discussions on social networks.

"Nerd culture"

Spatial.ai, a start-up that studies online conversations, collects location data for 72 categories – from "nerd culture" to "farm culture" – and helps companies determine whether certain types of personality are correlated with sales. Frequent topics in the "hipster" segment, for example, include antiques, vinyl records and coffee.

Working with Spatial.ai, the owner of the Brixmor Property Group Inc. shopping center has identified many online discussions about the girls' night out in the shopping center area of ​​Newtown, Pennsylvania. Thus, Brixmor has opened a "friendly biological concept for women" called Harvest Seasonal Grill instead of a steak restaurant, for example, according to Brixmor's general manager, Jim Taylor.

"You have a much better idea of ​​the travel habits of the community that uses your center, and that is often very revealing," Taylor said.

Privacy concerns are increasing. While the market has become more competitive, some vendors have begun to cut corners, said Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data Inc., who studied the structure of her moves to improve urban planning, lost a potential customer to profit of a competitor. refused to sell "gross trips" or individual trips. StreetLight only sells data on groups of people. In this way, if this should ever be compromised, the personal data would be protected.

"We do not want to use technology to erode confidence," Brixmor's Taylor said. "As a shopping center owner, you want to create dynamic uses that generate a lot of sales, a lot of traffic and allow you to increase rents over time." – Bloomberg

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