NRF Views: Paco Underhill Has Been Cloned

Pfreemanevans | January 17, 2008, 09:13 PM

At the NRF Big show this week I saw some new technologies that take a page right out of Paco Underhill's wildly successful consulting book. One company is called VideoMining. They use simple security cameras in retail stores and their technology creates metrics from the actual video footage. Figures like how many people go to the left when entering the store, how many items do people pick up, how long are they in the store, etc. VideoMining creates reports and dashboards for the retailers to assess and act upon (perhaps this is really where no one can be like Paco). But, this technology is both exciting and a little scary. It's exciting because it gives store retailers a way to track instore behavior in a similar manner to website tracking and can provide a rich trove of data. The key will be knowing what to do with the data, which is not small task as we have seen in the online space. On the downside, there could be privacy issues afoot. Since the video is no longer just used for security purposes, consumers might take offense. We'll be watching...or at least someone will be.