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by nathanlee 2685 days ago
While at a major beverage brand conglomerate, I used to be interested in this kind of data.

We had various projects that helped us gain insights on consumers from hiring agents, observing camera footage, tracking SKU sales & out-of-stocks, and use of beacons.

Every major FMCG company I've worked with already uses some tech vendor for segmented footfall model to drive placements of branded displays and promotional space.

We did run into real challenges conducting A/B tests in the retail environment though. Unlike with web apps where A/B tests are easily deployed and measured with analytics, in the retail environment, its hard to effectively measure success of A/B tests and attribute shopper motivation. Say if an A/B test is conducted on whether a retail display will drive sales of SKU's we'd need to be able to attribute sales against those SKU's. The challenge is that a FMCG company will try to place new products everywhere around the store and only on paid-for displays so it'll be hard to assess the success. Can you also track where in the store a product was picked into a cart?

What I think is an interesting angle you guys have is that you integrate with existing hardware/ security cameras in stores. Solutions sold to me required us to install new cameras to gain insights on our brand's aisles. It may help your go-to-market to partner with major security camera companies (like Avigilon http://avigilon.com/) to sell your document as a part of a bundle.

1 comments

Thanks Nathanlee, it’s great to hear about your experience in FMCG and some of the challenges you faced around A/B testing layouts and integrating sensors, I’d love to pick up a conversation with you about this.

We’re currently focused on speciality retail, especially where the store is more of a ‘show-room’ style such that product layouts and window displays can be more easily configured. We’re also considering partnerships with camera manufacturers as this is on our roadmap, but not mandatory at this stage as we integrate with any IP-camera system.