For years, some of the most valuable real estate in retail has been the "end cap" — the prominent display at the end of an aisle along the path nearly every shopper travels. Brands pay top dollar for that placement, yet have struggled to evaluate the return: how many shoppers passed the display, what share stopped and engaged, how long they stayed, and what impact it had. A new generation of multi-brand product showrooms — pioneers such as b8ta and Brookstone's makers showcase — built entire "retail-as-a-service" models on answering exactly those questions for the brands renting their space.
The Challenge
Showroom operators and the brands they host needed hard, quantitative data on display and fixture performance. Point-of-sale systems reported what sold, but not which displays and products actually engaged shoppers during their journey — the very metric these business models depend on to prove ROI to makers and to decide which products to bring into the store.
The Solution
Multi-brand showrooms use the RetailNext platform for interior analytics, capturing data through the Aurora® all-in-one IoT sensor, which fuses stereo video, Bluetooth, beacon, and Wi-Fi to measure shopper behavior. The solution organizes and analyzes data per display and per store to quantify impressions (shoppers who walk by), dwell (where shoppers stop and engage), the duration of each engagement, and conversion for shoppers exposed to specific products and displays.
The Results
With objective, display-level engagement metrics, showroom operators can give their brand partners real-time proof of how each fixture performs, prioritize which products earn prime placement, and run a data-driven approach to store operations — turning the long-standing "is this display working?" question into a measurable, repeatable discipline.
