• In-store shopper marketing is growing fast
  • Beware the location technology trap
  • Think of your marketing systems and capabilities in layers
By now, most people in consumer goods retail will have heard of beacon technology, how beacons can be used with an app to provide realtime shopper location in the store. The idea being that the retailer or brand, knowing where the shopper is, can then communicate a relevant promotion to the specific shopper.
But beacons are only one technology that’s able to provide realtime shopper location. Many companies (some more successfully than others) use wifi triangulation to locate the shopper on the sales floor. Other companies are usingmagnetic wave signals to provide location. And just the other day there was an article about a company embedding signals in store lighting that can be seen by an app to provide realtime shopper location.
While all these location technologies sound esoteric and exciting there is an important lesson here for marketers: Its not about the technology, its about the message to the shopper. Location technologies will come and go; already in just the past 24 months we’ve seen wifi displaced by beacons, and now beacons possibly being displaced by magnetic waves and lighting signals. If you’re a retailer or brand marketer, separate the location technology from the ‘intelligence’ layer of marketing systems when looking for solution providers.
Tying your marketing capability to a specific location technology is a sure bet for major headaches, if not worse, in today’s fast moving world of innovation. We know of one solution provider that tied shopper location and tracking to a specific technology, raised millions of dollars to scale into market, and then the technologies shifted to a newer approach rendering the solution this company had built useless. I regularly talk with retailers and major CPG brand manufacturers that are wowed by the tech capability but then fail to ask the right questions when evaluating solution providers.
As I have written about many times, it is the message to the shopper - especially when using realtime in-store location - that is the most critical piece of the puzzle; it must be contextually relevant to that specific shopper. 
If you are looking at using shopper location for marketing, push the solution providers you are evaluating to thoroughly explain how they have built their systems, is the shopper targeting ‘intelligence’ separate from the ‘location intelligence’ or are they tied together? It is our strong recommendation that shopper intelligence supporting strategic marketing initiatives be agnostic to the location technology used in the store.  
See more thoughts on tech-fueled innovation in retail on the CART blog