Retailers are watching where you look. Next time you walk into a large retail outlet, chances are that where you look is being to better understand consumer buying behaviour.

Technologies like retina-movement and RFID intelligence are finding their way into the retail space, letting shop owners know how long a shopper has looked at a particular product and what has caught the eye.

“With a help of various devices, we track shopper’s behaviour and pass on the data to retailers. We already have over 2,000 devices catering to various needs of retailers,” said Luca Anastasia, CEO, Hyera Techology, an Italian company supplying the technology.

Talks with retail majors

Hyera has partnered with ADI Retail system, which has players such as Toyota, Samsung, Sony and Bata as its clients. The company will soon deploy retina-movement technologies with some of the big multi-brand retail chains.

Companies such as Future Group, Shoppers Stop and Tata-owned Croma are already investing in some form of data analytics to study buying patterns.

“We work closely with Dunnhumby (a customer science company) to track data. The data are used to develop meaningful in-store campaigns and when used appropriately drives up incremental sales by 4-5 per cent,” Future Group’s Joint Managing Rakesh Biyani said.

Shoppers Stop analyses data from its loyalty programme and uses it to target shoppers for its communications for a certain product line resulting in augmented sales. Research and analytics major Nielsen also recently set up its first neuro marketing lab in Mumbai to study how people's brains respond to advertisements, marketing messages and product packaging.

Technology-led data analytical firms are seeing huge opportunities in the Indian market as retailers work towards profitability.

Catching the attention

Unilever had launched an insight centre to simulate a supermarket where consumers are invited to shop.

A device scans their retina to track the eye movement and displays the area that catches the consumers’ attention.

Both data analytics firms and retailers are upbeat about the sector as it is offers insights into more focused offers, promotions, store merchandising and even shoppers’ behaviour.

The data analytics market in India is expected to reach $1.15 billion by this year-end.

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