While the malls could certainly benefit from tracking customer shopping behavior, the customers should have to opt in to being tracked. Many customers prefer to remain anonymous to all but their favorite retailers and retail environments. That preference should be respected.

Just like retail stores, malls can gain important insights through shopper analytics. And with the general weakening of brick-and-mortar traffic, mall operators in particular should be measuring traffic volume and trends. Tracking shoppers via Wi-Fi signals on smartphones is perfectly fine as long as shoppers have opted in. Just because some segment of the population, like Millennials for example, seem to be OK with being tracked, doesn’t give mall operators the right to infringe on shopper privacy.

I think mall operators know what their problem is — malls have become a pain in the neck, especially the busy ones. Because:

• You’ve got to find a parking space;
• Hopefully the mall has an app to help you find the stores you want, otherwise you’ve got to find one of those digital boards with a “You Are Here” sign;
• Stores within a similar category are not always clustered together, meaning the shopper is potentially in for a very long walk
• Once you find the store you want and maybe the product you want, you have to hope they have it in the right configuration (color, size, whatever dimension the product is made in).

I’m not sure tracking is going to solve any of that and it might actually irritate some shoppers. I don’t think mall re-designs are conceptual rocket science, exactly … but given that they would involve moving multiple stores around, they would be an execution nightmare.

Probably not as useful a tool as it sounds. It’s pretty obvious where shoppers shop and don’t shop — and you don’t need high tech to figure that out — just stand there for 20 minutes and watch. No matter how you lay out a mall, some stores are going to be in fringe areas. I don’t think the tracking is ever a threat to privacy IF it’s done anonymously or with the person’s active permission.

I agree with Mark. Just because Millennials, many of whom share everything with everybody, are willing to be tracked doesn’t mean I or others want to be. I much prefer to remain as anonymous as I can fully realizing that it is impossible on the web.

For those malls and companies that want to track me, my expectation is that the information gained from what happens inside their locations is far more important than what someone does in the mall in general. Retailers know, or should know, what differentiates them from their competitors and their competitors from them.

As stated by several of my fellow BrainTrust colleagues, transparent collection and use of private data is a must, so I will focus on the first part of the discussion question. Malls are facing an existential challenge and need to rethink their role and function at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. Their original model was valued around convenience, efficiencies and an expanded choice set for consumers. Across those values, the mall today is slowly being replaced by online marketplaces/aggregators such as Amazon and eBay. Retailers’ own online shops, to the extent that they don’t integrate the store into the complete shopping experience, can also work to reduce mall traffic. The business model of anchor stores, which provide stability and lifeblood to malls, are coming under attack. This landscape calls for much more than behavior tracking that sheds light on what happens once a shopper enters the mall. My sense is that mall and store operators know this information already, but maybe seek confirmation or hope for some surprising insight. So… Read more »

When it comes to tracking and privacy there is a definite generational gap! We can all generally agree that Millennials and Generation Z don’t seem to mind tracking because they feel they will get something valuable in return. Generation Xers are on both sides of the fence. Once you go to older generations, the trend becomes negative. My feeling is that everyone needs to accept they are being tracked, measured, monitored, etc. far more than you realize whether it’s online of offline — and that’s not paranoia or cynicism talking, it’s a reality. I’ve spent plenty of time in industries that deal with this and I’ve always been surprised by just how much of what we do can be tracked. The real question is how anonymous is it. On malls, I agree with Paula Rosenblum and Stephen Needel for the most part. I don’t think the question is too hard for mall operators to answer. Paula is right — malls are a pain. In my household we only go to a mall if we absolutely… Read more »

The issue here isn’t tracking shoppers … it is about attracting shoppers to malls. Why fight the traffic, parking, and lines, when you have online options that are lower in cost, less hassle, and more inviting? Evolve or perish should be the cry for shopping malls.

We’re talking about at least two different topics here, 1) How malls can drive more traffic, and, 2) How can shoppers be tracked effectively? The first question lends to thoughts of compelling drivers for today’s shoppers. Depending on the study, 90%+ of people of all ages still shop in physical stores. This won’t change anytime soon. The challenge is to create the draw that gets them into the mall and makes them want to return often. Easier said than done, yet I see retailers of all types becoming the anchor tenants the bring the shoppers in. The second question has to do with consumer adoption of technology, in general. Only a few years ago, we struggled to capture basic information for retail “loyalty” programs. (I use that word loosely, but that’s yet another topic.) Today, people are happy to opt in to most any program, and I believe it is only a matter of time when most people of all ages will be comfortable with video tracking, and even tracking devices implanted into the human… Read more »

While customer tracking via beacons, and RFID tags can help provide details about the shopping journey, perhaps the most meaningful details to pull from this data, are the points along the experience, where friction, and frustrations occur. Similar to the abandoned online carts scenarios, there are critical points in the shopping journey, where the lack of service, interesting products, or just overall friction, where retailers will literally lose their customers … sometimes for good.

With that said, there needs to be compelling reasons, and incentives established for customers to opt in to be tracked. If it translates into meaningful personalized promotions, appropriate assortment offerings, and the fact that the retailers “get you”, and have the right products, at the right place, and ad the right times. This will remove help mitigate the creep factor. However, the right balance must be put into place, instead of bombarding your customers with endless popup offerings, you need to determine what volume, and types of communications work best.

Probably not. The last paragraph of the article exposes the big flaw in this thinking. What, exactly, will malls be able to do become “more attractive” based on the data they collect? Behavior tracking can traditionally improve conversion rates, but malls don’t have a conversion problem, they have a traffic problem.