Retail And Business Intelligence: How Video Technology Can Impact The Bottom Line

Video is a powerful retrospective tool that can enable insight and improvement.  Think of all the NFL football teams who, the day after every game, sit down to review yesterday’s “film” to break down the game into what went wrong and what went right so they can learn and up their performance the next time around.  Retail stores are implementing a similar practice – only they are going digital to source data.
Retailers are collecting digital data in many forms and using it for Business Intelligence (BI) purposes, which is the collection and analysis of information to enable greater business efficiencies and better decision-making. One of the more exciting emerging trends for retailers is mining video and using it as a source of critical business data, which makes sense given the context-rich information that video can provide. Retail stores of all sizes are starting to realize when you turn high-definition (HD) video (often coupled with specialty video analysis software) into data, it can provide insight into customer behaviour and opportunities for business improvement that were previously unseen and therefore not understood. 

“It’s an interesting development,” said Richard Smith, Professor and Director of the Master of Digital Media program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. “Grocery stores actually used to have big windows with one way mirrors around the roof of the store. It was partly because of loss prevention but also to get a better sense of their customers.”
He added: “Using video analytics to synthesize data and then generate intelligence – such as heat maps that indicate where people are piling up, is a very interesting and useful application for businesses.”
It is interesting; in fact mining data from video images is a potential game-changer for retail.  Think of the possibilities:

• High-end department stores can learn where to place merchandise based on foot traffic and crowd patterns
• Grocery stores can use demographic data (gender and age) derived from analytic software in footage from HD cameras to place product displays more strategically and impact the bottom line                                                  http://www.forbes.com/sites/avigilon/2014/11/14/retail-and-business-intelligence-how-video-technology-can-impact-the-bottom-line/?sr_source=lift_polar