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The latest developments in AI has impacted how brands are selling their products in-store. The retail landscape has changed a lot in the past decade. Few understand the magnitude of this change. One thing is clear though, early adopters will collect most of the benefits.
Stay ahead of the curve with this article as we outline the 4 ways AI has affected how brands are selling their products in your neighborhood retail store.
Preventing out-of-stock at retail stores
Brands have been affected by stock-outs for long. Retail stores are dealing with multiple brands at a time. This makes it difficult to honor planogram compliance brands have in place.
There are security cameras in every store that collects tons of video data. Using live feed from these cameras, ParallelDots ShelfWatch uses computer vision technology to highlight brands that are out-of-stock. The AI is capable of detecting whether a product is present on the shelf in real time with ODIN (On-Device Image Recognition).
Previously field reps used to check each retail store individually for on-shelf availability. This was a slow process, with stock-outs often going unnoticed for a long time, racking up huge losses for brands.
Customize your ideal Retail Experience
Are signages more effective at the entrance or at the cashier's point? Are round marketing materials more effective than square ones? At what height, my SKUs should be stacked? These are some questions that has troubled brand experts of many a large CPG companies.
Using security camera live feed & our computer vision AI, brand experts are now able to attribute the impact of merchandising elements on shopper experience. Analyzing foot traffic and the time customers spend looking at merchandising enabled brands to understand what works & what doesn’t.
Find out what’s in & what’s out
Brands historically exploited new trends & changes in styles to stay relevant. With the advent of social networks & photo-sharing platforms, there is a lot of data lying in the wild expanse of the internet. This goldmine of data is just what you need to figure out the latest trends.
For example, let’s consider the study conducted by Nielsen & ParallelDots to provide a holistic & unbiased view of the Indian consumers’ take on fairness by mining photos from Instagram. Among other insights, it was found that fairness continues to be a critical need for the Indian consumer, though some perceptions around it are evolving.
The focus is moving towards products providing lasting fairness as opposed to quick fixes, evident by the flat sales of the fairness creams meanwhile sales of face wash & body lotions have increased.
Riding the e-commerce wave
Traditional distribution channels were disrupted with the introduction of e-Commerce platforms. These platforms are unique as they promote products using a predefined set of algorithms.
To boost organic traffic to the products, brands are using specific keywords in the product image descriptor tags. This ensures efficient SEO. Doing this at a large scale in multiple languages is a challenging task.
Using Paralleldots computer vision technology we are able to tag thousands of product images with their specific keywords in their image descriptors tag. This helps CPG brands optimize traffic to their products on e-commerce platforms. In short, it drives up their revenues.
By now we have seen the ways AI has impacted the Retail Landscape. The objective of market research has never been different: to develop an understanding of the consumer. What has changed, though, are the paths that take us there, drastically shorter and cheaper.
Do you want to be innovative in your retail strategy? Book your free demo of ParallelDots products.
