Beacon-based Customer Tracking across the High Street: Perspectives for Location-based Smart Services in Retail

Abstract

Easy access to digital analysis of customer behavior and targeted advertising are principal advantages online retailers have over their stationary counterparts. \\ Existing manual and digital means for monitoring customer behavior in high streets are expensive to employ and/or technically complex, making them unfeasible for many retailers. \\ \\ This paper shows an approach for individual stores and high streets as a whole to facilitate spatio-temporal customer data collection based on connected mobile devices, Bluetooth beacons, and an underlying multi-sided community platform. A framework of analytical perspectives on customer data regarding various levels of analysis and beneficiaries is conceived, which provides novel design knowledge on location-based smart services for customer behavior analysis and targeted advertising in high streets.