Success of Indoor Location
Aside from the magic, the success of Indoor location can be attributed to 3 key levels of service:
– Indoor Location, like an indoor GPS, helps users find their way, with step by step navigation, offers the ability to discover the surroundings, can optimize their visit, locate their friends and colleagues, insure their security, and provide behavioral analytics to merchants on visitors’ paths.
– Micro-location allows travelers, visitors and shoppers to interact with a specific item, a product on a shelf, an art piece…The presence of the consumer is only identified when they are close to a BLE 4.0 beacon and lost when she’s far from it.
– Geofencing adds to the 2 previous approaches by bringing smart and reliable interaction. It acts as a virtual and invisible fence to send specific information when users enter or leave a specific area or venue. Geomarketing or loyalty-oriented interactions with context awareness are among the most common use cases.
Many new use cases are being developed for more personal use and these applications include in-storewalk-in detection, a partner or customer location during a show, guidance until the right gate with path time in an airport….
Another huge value these technologies bring to retail is to allow venue owners like retailers or shopping mall operators to track, in real-time, consumer behaviors to improve customer service and boost sales.
While knowing that someone is entering into a shop is interesting in itself, it still remains a very poor data compared to what a supplier of a holistic Indoor Location solution, like Pole Star, can offer today with a unique set of technologies and services, covering a large spectrum of use cases to lead the visitor in a personalized way.
In another example, in large buildings, the paths consumers use provide valuable insight into their behavior and interplay at different point of presences, and help the venue owner to optimize its venue and its overall sales and marketing strategy. Within a department store or a supermarket knowing the paths of shoppers throughout the venue will definitely help drive a more personalized user experience and improved customer relationships, as well as mobile context-aware advertising.
Which is why it doesn’t make sense to consider micro-location as a standalone solution solving the complex requirements and use cases of Indoor location. Although micro-location is an important piece of the entire Indoor location value chain, the only solution to maximize the value for a venue owner is to be able to follow consumer behavior from their initial shopping intent, far before the final interaction at the point of presence.
The success in realizing the full value of Indoor Location, comes first by attracting people in the building, or the shop then assist and guide them according to what they intend to do. Similar to what the Google search engine does online, but in the physical world, Indoor Location is the only technology able to suggest user interactions, based on their geolocation in a particular area or close to a specific object or shelves.
This is no revolution. The technology exists and has been already deployed and used in many indoor locations (shopping malls, airports, museums…). The new ability brought by Apple with iBeacon is to wake-up the application when a BLE beacon is close from the user iPhone in order to engage with customers even if the app was not initially opened. However the big topic now is how to motivate end-user to download the venue or brand generic application? Innovation has to happen now in the service to consumers, with killer applications that satisfy both consumers and venue owners, and in how location data can be used to analyze users’ indoor behaviors i.e. Big Data.
A global and holistic view of Indoor Location – not just micro-location – is essential to maximize the value of what it can bring to consumers, retailers and the society as a whole, as well as guarantee the satisfaction of venue owners.
For more information about Pole Star and its products, please visit: www.polestar.eu or www.polestarusa.com. In 2012, Gartner ranked Pole Star as one of the most promising companies in the indoor location market (“Competitive Landscape: Indoor Positioning Technologies”, Annette Zimmerman, November 8th 2012)
