At a recent tech showcase in Southeast Tennessee, I had a fascinating conversation with the User Experience Analytics Manager from a major retail conglomerate. He was demoing their latest software development. His company owns several malls in the US and they recently added free high-speed WiFi to each location. This was a strategic investment that extended far beyond the publicized interest in attracting customers back to brick-and-mortar retail. The WiFi installment gives customers free connectivity to the internet, but it also returns invaluable information to the mall owners. The moment a customer connects to the free WiFi, the mall immediately has access to portions of the user's digital footprint and their activity while shopping. The software allows the mall to create a heat map for each location that shows and analyzes customer traffic, average time spent in front of and in each store, time spent in the mall, number of stores visited, etc. He assured me (and I believe him) that they don't get any private or identifiable data, but they can see portions of each user's browsing data. More importantly, their analytics engine gets this information. Leveraging the same advanced analytics algorithms that large online companies like Amazon use to send you targeted adds (those adds where you Google "blue sweater" and then see a bunch of adds from Amazon on social media, showcasing a variety of blue sweaters), the mall is now able to sell analyzed, user-specific data to the retailers who lease space in their mall.
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October 2018
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