They see you when you're shopping. They know when you've been browsing.
No, not the jolly fat man and his coterie of elves. In this case, it's the merchants of Aalborg, Denmark, who have deployed a wide array of sensors throughout their annual Christmas market to track the movements of shoppers.
For the first time, the Aalborg City Business Association has installed a system called BlipTrack, made by Denmark-based BLIP Systems. It's an intriguing experiment to see if merchants can gather the kind of insights and information from shoppers in the physical world that e-commerce sites gather routinely now from online customers.
According to the association, the goal is to get better metrics on such things as the number of attendees, where they park, and whether the market is increasing revenues for merchants.
“If we are not able to measure the impact of events, such as the Christmas market, which costs over 1 million DKK ($160,000 US) to arrange, then the event is not justifiable, and perhaps money could be better utilized elsewhere,” Flemming Tingbak, director of Aalborg City Business Association, said in a statement.
