Augmenting the servicescape with ubiquitous interactive surfaces: Fibreshelf technology

Abstract

Well-stocked shelves are no longer sufficient for a store to survive in today’s highly competitive retail context. Nowadays, marketers should therefore also focus on targeting the consumer being in a shopping mindset. One of the main problems is that bricks-and-mortar retail stores struggle to gather information on their customers’ path-to-purchase, which - compared to online shopping processes - tends to remail a 'black box' to retail management. This paper proposes to instrument shelfspace in an unintrusive way with optical sensing fibres (i.e., 'FibreShelf' technology) to detect customer-product interactions for three purposes: (1) automated shelf inventory management, (2) gaining shopper insights, (3) targeting shopper needs in realtime in-store. The FibreShelf Technology digitally enhances the self-servicescape by reporting to a backend system on three main customer-product interaction shelf events (i.e., 'take', 'return' and 'remove'). On top of these actions, certain applications can be built to optimize shelf space management, and to transform shelf event data into relevant shopper marketing information and develop shopper marketing actions at the point-of-sale. The paper concludes with a list of priority research propositions to further advance academic shopper marketing knowledge regarding instrumented servicescapes and processes.