Location Based Marketing Moves Ahead

Cisco announced last week a new technology that can be used to track customers in or near their stores. It uses the customers' cell phone signals, transforming them into WiFi signals, which can then be transmitted back to the store WiFi and analyzed. The technology can track their location quite accurately. In addition, if the customer has previously purchased at that store and agreed to a store promotional campaign, the technology can bring up their past history of shopping and their preferences. All of this big data is then analyzed and used to offer the shoppers special deals on the spot. It's a classic location-based marketing exercise using big data analysis techniques. It's a technology that has a very bright future, since smart phones are holding more and more information and are about to be used for payments, adding additional information to the mix. See this article on Cisco's announcement.