Camera tracking: a new tool for market research and retail management

Various attempts have been made to study in‐store customer behaviour, mainly using manual recording techniques. Manual recording usually involves tracking a customer round a store and tracing the customer's path on a store plan. Other behavioural features such as product handling, verbal contact with sales assistants, display viewing, can also be recorded on the store plan. The recorded data can then be collected and an overall picture of customer traffic and customer behaviour obtained. The extremely labour intensive nature of this technique makes it very time consuming and difficult to obtain a large sample size. Furthermore it is almost impossible to gain a comprehensive picture of customer behaviour throughout the whole store at any given moment or series of moments in time.