Football Leads to Footfall for SRI

UK company Shopper Retail Insight (SRI) has developed a new service based on football player performance analytics, in order to deliver an improved understanding of in-store shopper behaviour.

Founded in 2011, Leeds-based SRI offers a range of services to understand what shoppers do in store, how they respond to promotions and new layouts, how they handle products, and how they interact with store staff.

The firm is now employing analytics techniques used by premiership, championship and major league football clubs to examine how customers behave en masse while in retail environments.

Using inconspicuously-placed digital recording equipment, SRI collects and analyses more than 500,000 hours of sports and retail video every year. Charles Offer, the firm's Director of Shopper Retail Insight, says this data shows that the distance, routes and actions taken by footballers are very similar to those of shoppers.

'How many seconds on the ball translates into how many seconds browsing a fixture,' he states. 'This is not about watching individuals in a big-brother fashion but understanding patterns of shopper behaviour and producing tangible insights that benefit brands and retailers.'

SRI says the new service - which is available across an entire store, for category-level insight, staff interaction evaluation or for promotions monitoring - provides the same kind of information to bricks-and-mortar businesses as cookies do to Internet retailers.

Web site: www.shopperretailinsight.com .