Behaviors Don't Lie - RapidBlue Maps Your Retail Patterns
RapidBue Solutions has earlier been working with proximity marketing solutions that use Bluetooth to offer a wide range of content directly to consumers' mobile phones at point-of-sales, events, and exhibitions. Now the company has finalized a new product offering and is starting to expand more widely into the Nordic countries.
Retailers, exhibition and event organizers, and shopping malls, for example, always need better ways to understand their customers, and in essence, learn about their consumers' real movements in the physical space. RapidBlue is now aiming to enable them to better market to their customers and track the effectiveness of the marketing actions and layouts based on real consumer behavioral data. The solution works in any area over any time period, and tracks when, where and how the customers move.
RapidBlue collects the consumer behavior info through Bluetooth technology from the actual visitors' mobile phones (most of the new low-medium to highend handsets have a Bluetooth feature). The firm uses so called Bluetooth (BT) Universally Unique Identifiers that each BT device has in order to distinguish unique visitors.
As RapidBlue only tracks the identifiers of devices, they have no knowledge of the actual identity of the visitors. Hence the firm is convinced their solution is both simpler and better for the consumers' privacy than solutions based on, for example, tracking GSM network signals from the phones.
With a new customer, RapidBlue will set up Bluetooth surveillance devices in the customer's premises, and use their proprietary software for tracking the incoming visitors and calculating their routes. For consumers the automatic scanning of the Bluetooth signals is totally invisible. RapidBlue will then construct report(s) for the customer on the consumer behavior after the agreed surveillance period, which could be one-time or continuing over months.
The images here show examples of the reported behavior the firm provided to one of its customers after a month's test period. The detailed results include also other stats like the minutes spent on location based on the weekday and the hour of the day, and amount of recurring visits during the tracking period.
Of course, a challenge with the solution is that not everybody has their mobile's Bluetooth feature turned on (while, on the other hand, some do not know they have it on). RapidBlue's Co-founder Sampo Parkkinen tells that generally this has not seemed to be a problem, as in their pilots they have noticed that at least 20% of the visitors have BT on at all times, which is enough to produce reliable results. The estimated total amount of visitors during the test period depicted here is 165,000, while the company estimates they were able to track 26 % of the visitors.
Sampo says that they are now done with the beta period with pilot customers, and are kicking off the internationalization efforts. The company is also further developing the solution to allow for real time tracking of data.
RapidBlue is currently funded by the three founders and a business angel, and is looking for new angel-type financing in the range of several hundreds of thousands to support the internationalization.
[...] ArticStartup blogista suomalaisesta RapidBlue Solutions yrityksestä. Tähän saakka yritys on tehnyt bluetooth [...]
Sounds good! Not that familiar with this kind of technology so don't know if the following idea is already used everywhere: What if they put a bluetooth "thing" in the badges or whatever you get when you go to an exhibition or event, that way you'd get 100% results. I grocery stores, you put it in trolleys and shopping baskets. Malls are a bit trickier though, but as the Co-founder said, 20 % is enough for reliable results, would think that with the larger amount of people in malls you get quite a lot of data.
...after a while of thinking, isn't RFID used for this kind of stuff already =P Now to wake up and educate myself...
Hi Sake!
Thanks for your comments. You are right, in locations where everyone uses a certain type of item while walking around, such as a shopping trolley or a badge, RFID could be used. Ekahau even do WiFi-based tracking of items in these locations.
The added advantage of Bluetooth currently is that there is no need for tags i.e. locations such as shopping malls, airports, department stores and other areas where tags cannot be placed anywhere can also be measured. From strictly a consumer research point-of-view, the 20% take we can get from the population is more than enough, considering the current consumer behaviour information that is available.
RFID is a very viable alternative in the future for tagless tracking, currently the problem obviously is the relatively small number of mobile phones that RFID is present in and the lack of practical application for consumers to keep their RFID on in their mobile phones.
However now that we have a basic platform ready for consumer behavioural tracking and analysis, new technologies can be plugged in as they emerge and surpass Bluetooth in feasibility (which will happen).