Let There Be Light: Smart Lighting Illuminates Retail

When you think of in-store lighting, you likely conjure an image of those long, neon florescent tubes that hang over the isles, their humming and buzzing barely drowned out by the muzak that plays from out the speakers. Well, those are quickly becoming a thing of the past, as retailers are catching on to the potential that smart lighting presents to their industry.

As technology continues to advance in just about every field out there, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to find new ways to connect all of us through all of our products, smart lighting technology offers retailers, as well as brands, new opportunities to measure store and product metrics, and to connect directly with their customers. The challenge they face is one that is common among most new advances in technology: how to balance the benefits offered while avoiding alienating their clientele through a potential invasion of their privacy and personal space.

More than just energy efficient and cost-saving, the most recent LED smart lighting can be implemented with tracking technology which retailers will use to locate shoppers, as well as to help optimize their shopping experience. These new LED ceiling lights can triangulate with each other and any customer’s exposed smart phone (no program downloading needed) in order to identify that person within 8-to-12 inches of their precise location.

The back-end benefit of this application is readily apparent: retailers and brands can use the analysis provided by this tracking tech to study the behavior of their customers in relation to their products and store layout. Heat maps can reveal new data regarding in-store traffic flow, product placement and display, customer interaction with staff, and the use of new mobile concierge applications.

It’s those mobile concierge applications which provide the most potential benefit in terms of connecting retailers with their customers, but it is also the one that they must take the most stringent care to employ responsibly. It is doubtful that shoppers will show much concern over their movements being tracked and recorded by smart lighting technology, since they already know that they’re being recorded by security cameras in just about any store they enter. Mobile concierge apps, on the other hand, have not yet caught on with the larger public, even though they’ve seen an increasingly accelerated rollout of late.

Smart lighting mobile concierge apps—such as the pilot program currently been tested by Philips, in partnership with Aisle 411—use near field communication to send notices to customers’ smart phones alerting them about product location, prices, ingredients, special offers, and even recipes. Such alerts can come off as incredibly intrusive if used negligently, thus alienating customers from the retailer (and potentially even the brand of the product about which they are being inundated with unwanted information).

The key to deploying this particular technology, as it is with near-field communication as a whole, is to present and implement the application as a service, rather than an advertisement. That way, the customer shopping experience is streamlined and optimized, rather than intruded upon and made aggravating. That this will soon be done through in-store equipment that the customer does not even notice—the overhead lighting—presents the opportunity for a smooth and responsible implementation.

Smart retailers know that with any new tool, they must take strenuous care to avoid annoying their customer base. Smart lighting tracking technology and near field communication is no exception. Likely, retailers and brands have already ‘seen the light’, and know which is the best direction to take going forward.