Shinji Sogo, CEO & Inamori Manabu, COO Everything an individual does leave a trail of data behind; a path of breadcrumbs that intricately reveals an individual’s daily activity and behavioral pattern. These data sets have become especially beneficial for businesses today, as the information helps them understand their consumers better and offer more personalized services. Determining store visit times, frequency, duration or considering the shopping behavior of different age groups help clients to build a more accurate target audience profile.
The retail sector, in particular, is now looking at data collection and analysis to understand the impact of their new initiatives. For example, when stores consider closing down during the night, many of them turned to analyzing different effects of the decision, such as how many customers they would lose, whether the “night-time” customers would go to another shop or come during the opening times.
To help such retailers deliver excellence that’s on par with modern ecommerce brands, enters AdInte—an AI-driven retail tech company, specializing in AI-based and data-driven marketing solutions that strongly support O2O and OMO methodology to solve retail issues. “Our mission is to ‘scientify physical retail stores using IoT and AI,” says Shinji Sogo, the CEO of AdInte.
According to Sogo, traditional marketing approaches are becoming obsolete for online stores. Despite embracing digitalization, the impact isn’t always synchronous. The tactics often fall short in quantitatively grasping the actual conditions of retail stores or obtain accurate customer feedback. This is where AdInte steps in as a game-changer for retail stores by driving significant digital transformation, thanks to novel technologies like AI and IoT.
With AdInte’s proprietary technology—AIBeacon IoT sensor, retailers can have access to a plethora of services such as customer analysis, segment extraction, customer acquisition methods, and sales promotion.
Our mission is to ‘scientify physical retail stores’ using IoT and AI
AIBeacon, as a technology, is a combination of Wi-Fi packet sensors and BLE Beacon in one device developed to integrate store analysis data with peer-to-peer digital marketing. The Wi-Fi function of the sensor measures the number of visitors and the length of their stay, while the BLE function enables more in-depth communication by sending push notification to the customers. AIBeacon is able to accumulate far more data than the conventional beacons which only use Bluetooth. The data collected by AIBeacon is not only used for store analysis but also for the analysis of urban flow and tourism migration behavior.
“We also conduct large scale marketing and planning by consolidating data acquired by AIBeacon into our multi-data management platform called ‘AdInte DMP,’ which saves all data (AIBeacon data, GPS data, and real store data, among others),” explains Sogo. The solution provides our clients with advanced peer-to-peer approaches that match their customer’s lifecycle and purchasing orientation. Our customer can access DMP so they can decide to whom they want to send advertisement. For example, they can choose to send only to customers who came to the store, or only females between 30s and 40s in a certain area etc. The service itself is called AIGeo.
Over the past decade, AdInte has also developed a targeted advertisement delivery platform, AIGeo, which enables retailers to reach out to customers with specific ads based on their geographical characteristics and behavioral choices. It makes use of GPS data as well as data accumulated by AIBeacon to capture the behavior of customers from multiple angles by performing sales area analysis and customer profiling technology to ensure a matching advertisement for each individual.
For instance, today, retailers collect most customer information about their product and brand preference through their membership cards or cellphone apps.
However, only 20-30 percent of the buyer population can be analyzed that way, since not everyone opts for membership or agrees to install apps, which creates a gap in consumer data accumulation. To overcome this gap, uses AIBeacon SDK—an application that is installed on consumer’s phones to get better location data, than only using only GPS data. Used along with the AIBeacon, a retailer can know precisely in which row inside a shop or in front of which vending machine, a customer is standing. Leveraging this, it is possible to send real time sales information (push notifications) for a product that the customer is looking at, at that instant. By evaluating this data alongside retail membership information, Adinte’s services allow retailers to take essential measures to convert general customers into loyal customers.
Notably, many of the Japanese retail stores today leverage AdInte’s devices and analysis methods in various advertisements, advertisement effect measurements, and target selection for product development. “Together with that, by integrating AdInte’s SDK into a specified phone application, we can send push notifications based on the tendency of store visits. In this sense, we provide a variety of services from analysis to the execution of action plans,” adds Sogo.
By gradually releasing IoT devices that further expand digital contact points with customers, AdInte has begun to create exceptional customer experiences that were previously not possible with AIBeacon alone. Moving ahead, the company plans to introduce the ‘Automation Cellar AIICO,’ which recognizes and understands customer characteristics, consumption propensity and proposes the best products.
AdInte also envisions to implement the ‘intelligent tag,’ that enables real-time marketing using digital signals such as NFC and RF, which have a wide range of possibilities for UX. With this digital technology as a foundation, Adinte is snowballing ahead to deliver its expertise in agriculture with Agri 2.0, and also healthcare. “We strive to implement an evolutionary transition to ‘improve the living experience and create a more comfortable social culture’ with digital networks built into smart cities,” concludes Sogo.
