Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/528948
say it is impossible to know exactly how many retailers are using this, the ways they are using it, and whether or not such use has been successful. Com- panies are being secretive, for fear of alarming customers or tipping off com- petitors. (Several declined interview re- quests for this article.) As a result, there is no quantified system or benchmark to measure success. "I see a lot of inter- est in using Big Data to generate value, but I see very little in quantified data" related to levels of success, Dhar said. This lack of information can foster anxiety in retail owners. "The landscape out there is one of hope and expecta- tion and worry," Dhar said. "There's the hope that companies will be able to de- rive a lot of value from the information, but there's also the worry that they're not moving fast enough and that some- one will disrupt them out of existence." Right now, most companies using Big Data are drawing conclusions about consumers' buying patterns and behav- ior by studying and analyzing mass data trends, rather than tracking people indi- vidually. The analytics are not quite fully in place yet to help determine whether the person seated at a computer in New York City and who ordered a J.Crew dress last week is the exact same person who is just now, two weeks later, enter- ing the Michael Kors store at The Grove, in Los Angeles. "The holy grail is to stitch together a customer-centric view, which is hard to do based on the frag- mented information that flows in from various channels," said Dhar. "There is, though, all kinds of information you can buy from third-party providers to inte- grate with information you have." AirSage, an Atlanta-based provider of population and location analytics, is among the nation's largest sellers and aggregators of Big Data related to travel information. AirSage works with two of America's top-three cellphone carriers to put software that is embedded inside the data center's of the carriers. At any given moment, AirSage can tell where a third of the U.S. population happens to be — though it strips out all the personal infor- mation from the data. For the past 18 months, AirSage has sold these data sets to reatilers, brokers and real estate developers to help with site analysis. "We can tell you, at any point, how many people might be trav- eling past a certain location — and how important they are to your target mar- ket," said Andrea Moe, AirSage's vice president of product management and marketing. "If a restaurant chain that's lo- cated right off the highway, for instance, wants to put up a billboard, we can tell you how many residents in the area pass by it, versus how many visitors." Though AirSage declines to name any businesses it has contracted with, Poe says the com- pany helped one Los Angeles mall chain better understand the demographics and activities of shoppers at 10 competing shopping malls. The chain used that info to change its marketing strategy, she says. MasterCard Advisors, the profes- sional-services arm of MasterCard, en- tered the commercial real estate arena in May with the launch of Retail Loca- tion Insights. Analyzing and collating anonymous data gleaned from card us- age — the company processes about 160 million transactions per hour at some 38 million merchants worldwide — Re- tail Location products provide a look into aggregated sales at retail locations across the U.S. and Canada. "The retail commercial real estate market has relied for a long time on third-party, self-reported and anecdotal sales data to measure the revenue per- formance of locations, so it's been a very nontransparent market," said Gary Kearns, MasterCard Advisors' group ex- ecutive for information service. "We saw there was a big void we could fill by pro- viding transparent and upfront scores and insight into something as small as a census block." Retail Location Insights provides scores on five points, including a site's stability, performance and traffic. "There are consumer credit scores that help banks determine credit risks to lend money," said Kearns. "We want to pro- vide that same kind of transparency and service for the commercial real estate market." Analysts believe that Big Data has the potential to transform the way re- tailers operate, but only once consum- ers become more comfortable with the idea. Sanderson likens the concept to the introduction of the cellphone. "Early on most people were very dismis- sive of mobile phones," he said. "They saw them as intrusive to their business and personal lives. They didn't want to be accessible every minute of time." But the thinking changed as people began to realize the freedom and benefits cell- phones were bringing, he says. It is fear and a lack of transparency that causes consumers to shy away from providing information on their prefer- ences. "Retailers need to prove to cus- tomers that, when they click a box, the information they're providing will pro- vide a more engaging, beneficial experi- ence for them," Sanderson said. This means less spam, coupons for items a customer actually wants to use, and a more open environment that allows customers to talk to retailers, and retail- ers to talk back to customers. "Most people will buy into it," said van Rijmenam. And as Big Data be- comes more universal and accurate, forecasters predict that retailers will have the ability to create individualized portraits of consumers, to know when a customer is about to enter the store, and to have correspondingly suggested items prepared for them when they do enter, and at a discounted price — all of which are the things consumers value, says van Rijmenam. "There will always be a group of customers that don't want their data used," he ob- served, "but they will be the ones who have to pay more for everything." SCT J u l y 2 0 1 5 / S C T 37