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Video Surveillance In Retail As Marketing And Sales Tool

When you are thinking of installing video surveillance in your shop, how many uses can you come up with for it? Security is, of course, the first that comes to mind (including both visible and hidden surveillance) but is it all the cameras are capable of? Is it not usable as a sales tool? Marketing and sales management analysts disagree.

Modern marketing experts are particularly concerned with matters that essentially evolve around demand. What do people want more? Do they know what they want? How do I make sure that they can find exactly what they want, preferably while having a glance at other things they might be interested in? These are key questions for proper placement of goods on shelves, window displays and stalls. There is a variety of ways to answer these: from simple statistical analysis to questionnaires. Unfortunately, few of them are truly reliable: nothing is holding customers from lying in the form they happen to fill in voluntarily, nor researchers to falsify the results. While trying to process the demand and its intricacies it is imperative to have a lot of accurate raw data.

Video surveillance as marketing and sales tool can be used for analysis

And this is exactly where video surveillance shines as a sales tool.

Video surveillance is a powerful marketing and sales tool

Cameras overlooking the aisles are inevitably watching the customers while they are browsing the merchandise. This footage is a goldmine of valuable information for an experienced marketing and sales expert. Finding out which aisle is visited more often than the others tells us quite reliably what line of merchandise tends to attract more customers. Age and gender of the visitors show whether the marketing experts were right with their predictions for a given line and whether the placement was appropriate. Customers picking up certain merchandise and making inquiries about it signalize about the lack of information on that particular product. Finally, the footage allows to determine returning customers who are the bread and butter of any retail shop.

Video surveillance is capable of becoming a powerful sales tool and a valuable source of information for a concerned shop owner. Getting the very best out of what you have is not just a rare ability but a real necessity in our competitive world of marketing and sales management.

But who of managers has the time to watch through hours if not days of raw footage of customers? True, there is this fast forward playback that allows to show videos with accelerated speed. But here lies the problem: loo low speed takes so much time to watch the footage, while too fast playback almost guarantees that you will miss all the important information.

Luckily, contemporary video surveillance addresses the needs and challenges of contemporary retail. The answer is automated smart features that are using artificial intelligence to do the analysis for you. That’s right: advanced video camera systems can analyze what is going on in their sight and report on demographics, mood, choices, interests and other behavior patterns and compile overview reports that can be later watched by a manager in a matter of minutes.
As if it wasn’t amazing enough, they also have no days off or breaks, working industriously and tirelessly.

Here are some video surveillance tools that will be most useful in retail marketing:

Heatmap * Visitors Counter (basic) * Visitors Counter (advanced) * Unique Visitors Counter * Face Recognition * Fashion Store (coming soon) * Behavior Analysis * Text Recognition (reading price tags) * Age and Gender * Stay Time Tracking * Notifications * Object Recognition * Crowd/Queue Detection * Smoke Detector * Privacy Masking * Synchronization with POS * Eye Tracking

More about Xeoma in retail and shops Would you like to use Xeoma as both a video surveillance system and as a marketing tool? Read the detailed info in our article: 8 ways to grow your business fast. Collecting marketing information with Xeoma. and in Eye Tracking: gathering neuromarketing information on potential customers’ preferences

Video surveillance can be a good aid in businesses of various types (retail included). One of its forms is an efficient marketing tool that can gather information about people in sight, best placement of products, direction of customers’ interests, etc. Find your business type and suggested solutions in our Sitemap.

17 September 2016, updated January 27, 2023

Read also:
8 ways to grow your business fast. Collecting marketing information with Xeoma.
Video surveillance for business and major systems
Emotion recognition for your business. Employee control.
Measures for Business Security Protection with Xeoma Videosurveillance
Cross-Line Detector (advanced Visitors Counter, or Tripwire)
Unique visitors counting – detection of new clients
Panic Button
Restaurant security system in food service industry
Security camera installation in the shop center
Shop surveillance and crime prevention