DDi - July 2013 - (Page 80)

80 | Shopping with Paco Facial recognition T he summer of 1970, I worked in Boston as the office boy at Beacon Press, the left-wing publishing arm of Unitarian Universalist Church, whose headquarters were next door. I had an office with a window, a very benevolent boss and several older female editors who thought I looked like a Mormon version of Jesus Christ (read: wavy blond hair and blue eyes), but kept their cougar instincts in check until I left for college at the end of the summer. It was a great three months of stimulation. One of the hot books Beacon published that season was the first edition of Daniel Ellsberg’s “The Pentagon Papers,” which precipitated a national controversy by releasing top-secret government information. The author trooped through the office that summer and afforded me barely a glance, but I knew I was witnessing history. Wiki Leaks, Facebook and modern government surveillance practices have complicated matters tenfold. Regardless of location, age or gender, everyone has something to say about the gray-area issue of what is public and what is private today. As a market researcher who makes his living collecting and interpreting information, the question is even more acute. For those of us in the retail community whose success is predicated on the mixture of art and science, it cuts to the core of the evolution of our practice. When we vote, we vote anonymously. We may be in a certain district, city or state, but there is no way, in principle, for someone to link the cast of vote to an individual. When we fill out a customer comment card, we are given the option of adding our name and contact information. Or not. Similarly, in the broader world of market research, where we are often paid to respond to a survey, partake in a focus group or participate in an online panel, specific identifying details are not what we are after. The information that is collected may be broken down by demographic codes, based on time of day, sex, age, income or other criteria. When we track someone’s behavior in a store visually, we make assumptions about age and gender, race and appearance or dress. No names or addresses are collected; we are not interested in what Mrs. Jones does as an individual, but instead in how her information either fits or doesn’t into a broader pattern. Our skill as researchers is how we construct and deconstruct those patterns and, more importantly, point to a more meaningful finding. In 2013, we are now witnessing a totally different way of collecting information, where the data points are directly linked to an individual. It goes beyond credit card companies crunching and monetizing our purchase patterns, or online agencies analyzing our click streams to customize the ads that appear on the Web pages we view. Now, not only are phone calls scanned, but our movement patterns can be tracked if we simply leave our mobile phones on and walk in the door. Since the mobile phones we each carry are linked to a number, a name and often an address, the information that can be retrieved can be breathtakingly personalized. The facial recognition programs developed for security applications are making their way into our commercial environments. A security camera scans the faces of people walking in the door and conceptually tracks them from camera to camera across the environment. | July 2013 What do we do with that information? The software designers are all about automating the actions that result from their data collections. It is not that someone looks for the larger patterns of human behavior or to inform effective strategies for other areas like visual merchandising, signage placement, sightlines or store designs and formats. What it does do is recognize that you are approaching the shoe section, and it will send you a text message with a coupon for a brand you have purchased in the past. It could alert a sales associate to look out for you; or add to a profile you don’t know about that customizes what is mailed to your home; or the ads that appear when you visit that merchant online. Some of the above is within the providence of wellaccepted 21st-century marketing practices—some of it is downright creepy. Our ability to collect information on customers is growing faster than our moral or legal compass can evaluate its legitimacy. At what point do customers push back on how their personal information is collected and used? One of the issues we are confronting is clients buying into data collection and coming to us asking, “What can I do with this information?” Our merchant community needs to examine how it collects and uses information, and what information is effective or merely adding to the noise. Being caught on the wrong side of the fence will have major consequences. —Paco Underhill is the founder of Envirosell and author of the books “Why We Buy,” “Call of the Mall” and “What Women Want.” He shares his retail and consumer insights with DDI in a bi-issue column. www.ddionline.com http://www.ddionline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DDi - July 2013

DDi - July 2013
Contents
From the Editor
From the Show Director
Newsworthy
Shopper Insights
Editor’s Choice
Visual Perspectives
Design Snapshot
Karl Lagerfeld
Walgreens
Fred Perry
World Department Store Forum
Fixture Leaders Listing
Company Index
Right Light
In-Store Technology
Product Spotlight
Calendar
Advertisers
Classifieds
Shopping with Paco

DDi - July 2013