Location data technology company Blis has launched an analytics tool that allows marketers to analyse consumer behaviour – from audience profiling, to exposure, to attribution – by capturing and activating mobile movement data.
Smart Trends offers robust in-store consumer behavioural insights and in-store comparison of multiple location types and brands, allowing marketers to break down demographic, contextual, time/day, and device type analysis, as well as compare behaviour of user groups side by side.
Powered by mobile movement data, Smart Trends is a passively collected data set that overlays device ID, longitude and latitude, and time stamp data.
This passive data set is then merged with a wide range of behavioural data to create a more comprehensive consumer profile, thus exceeding the scope of traditional location data in that it represents a consumer’s location movement over a period of time.
To demonstrate the capabilities of Smart Trends, the company also announced the release of a ground-breaking report, Mastering Consumer Trends: A Global Retail Study, giving side-by-side behavioural comparison of user groups across four global brands in seven countries.
The study found that shoppers in Sydney are more likely to be contextual browsers, visiting sites or apps related to their activity. This activity was on par with shoppers in London, with both cities recording 34 per cent of shoppers browsing style and fashion content in store.
As such, instead of purely sending an advertisement to an audience, advertisers can use movement data trends to deliver relevant communications in the most impactful format at the most appropriate time and place to influence behaviours and brand sentiment among target audiences.
Comparing shopper behaviour in Australia, the UK, the US, South Africa, the UAE, Germany, and Singapore as consumers interacted online and offline with H&M, Topshop, Victoria’s Secret, and Zara touch points, the study illustrates Smart Trends’ ability to unlock consumer behaviour insights on purchase intent, shopping patterns and mobile consumption while shopping.
Nick Ballard (pictured above), managing director of Blis for Australia and New Zealand, said customers have never had as many media – and therefore advertising – touch points as they have today.
“The line between online and offline continues to blur and brands are continually battling for attention,” he said.
“Both the analytics tool and study can provide helpful learnings and give marketers and brands a holistic view of the consumer, which is information that can be applied to future campaigns.
“Lessons segmented by creative, line item and audience be feed back into the planning cycle to help marketers make the most of movement data and drive incremental gains for efficiency and effectiveness.”
Brands can use this non-biased data set to gain a factual perspective of their competitive marketplace and consumers’ behaviours.
For instance, while marketers generally have good insight on how their customers interact with their own brands, they lack the ability to understand how their customers behave when they’re shopping with competitors, or even their more general day-to-day behaviours.
Smart Trends fills those gaps, ultimately enabling more effective campaign planning, delivery and attribution in order to deliver competitive advantage.
The study also demonstrates that out-of-context browsing can indicate areas of crossover interest amongst brands’ shoppers which could be used to inform future messaging or media partnerships.
