There are many uses for people tracking in retail areas, from simple people counting to determining customer flow, dwell time etc.
This weekend at a rock festival in Brussels, bluetooth technology is being used to observe the movement of tens of thousands of festival goers. They have set up 36 bluetooth scanners across the site and along a few surrounding roads as well as bus stops to track people moving within a 30m radius of the scanners. The technology tracks people’s mobile phones using the device’s MAC address. Recording the MAC address protects the user’s privacy as it cannot be associated to a phone number of personal details.
Tracking via bluetooth has some interesting applications outside of this broader urban movement style application. It can be used to track customer movement within shopping centres, train stations, airports etc. It can also potentially be used to identify & track suspicious movement.
One of the criticisms often made against this kind of research, or indeed Bluetooth proximity marketing, is that “very few people use bluetooth”. Why people say that I’m not sure but I hear it frequently. But how many people do really use Bluetooth? Well the Australian Communications & Media Authority released a study a few months back which indicated that 57% of Australians have Bluetooth enabled mobile devices and 36% use it (Source Nielsen Online 2008). OK that doesn’t mean their bluetooth is on ALL the time but a lot of them would have it on in public places in order to make use of headsets. Even if only half of them are on at any given time in a public place, that is a very decent sample and likely to be far more accurate for tracking purposes than the likes of intercept interviews asking people where they’ve been, which not only has sample error but also respondent error in recall.
But if a sample of 15-20% isn’t enough then perhaps consider initiatives used by the likes of T-Mobile, Virgin or heaps of other stores. They use bluetooth for proximinity marketing within their stores. To increase hit-rates, they have signs at the door and through the store encouraging people to activate their bluetooth in order to receive special promotional messages, bonuses & free gifts sent to their phones via bluetooth.
