29 ANNIVERSARY
Taking the pulse T
Customer traffic is the lifeblood of any retail or shopping centre destination and in the two past decades footfall measurement has not only taken root but has evolved into a major service. Sean Kelly investigates the evolution of customer counting systems
echnology has transformed not just customer counting but the identification of where and how they move. The way in which the captured data is assessed against a host of other
data sets including maps, weather and historical information is turning the ‘art’ of retailing into a science. Furthermore, customer traffic analysis is becoming even more integral to future management and successful retail operations as efforts to identify and understand the customer intensify. However it’s an industry that has experienced growing pains. In the
early days footfall counting by human hand was more extrapolated guesstimate than accurate estimate. Even today there is industry- acknowledged error of accuracy in the technology and, beyond that, potential for so-called ‘customer abuse’ of both systems and data. Industry lore has tales of centre managers resisting systems so head office wouldn’t see the ‘real’ (rather than manager-reported) figures and of managers repeatedly walking and waving clipboards in front of the counters to, ahem, ‘assist’ numbers. Hugh Radford, who was at Hillier Parker working on high street shops in the South of England in 1991, recalls the early days of customer counting with a certain wryness. “In one sense it was the early days of footfall measurement,”
Radford, now head of UK retail development, investment and leasing at DTZ, recalls. “The measurement of footfall over the past 20 years has evolved in to an industry in itself. My feeling, however is that the retail industry doesn’t tend to take too much notice of the actual numbers as many schemes measure it in different ways and some schemes still appear to have footfall figures that beggar belief.” “Footfall back 20 years ago was often counted by nice ladies using
clickers and done once or twice a year,” recalls Tony Longstaff, centre director at The Shopping Centre in Milton Keynes (now thecentre:mk) from 1994 to 2007. “Then we introduced an infra-red beam system at each entrance which counted people when they walked across the beam. The problem came when people crossed the beam at the same time: they were counted as just the one person. Eventually we moved to a camera-based system using overhead cameras and a computer programme. As I recall this had limitations because it didn’t count
people above or a below a certain height. We constantly had to adapt the computer programme to factor that into the equation.” Longstaff, now head of marketing effectiveness assessment agency Marketing Analytix, believes customer counting systems have grown in importance. “Current systems enable a centre to use the data to more
closely match staffing levels to footfall,” he says. “To this day I don’t think customer counting systems are used as comprehensively as they might be. Consistency remains the biggest problem. Also, few centres use the tremendous data to enable them to drill down and measure the effect of their various advertising campaigns and onsite promotions and events.” PFM Counting Solutions, founded in 1984 as Lee Integer, has
“Customer counting systems still aren’t being used as comprehensively as they might”
evolved industry technology from simple counting systems to current ones utilising Doppler radar and stereo CCTV. Today client centres include Westfield London and the soon-to-open Westfield Stratford, among others. “Over the last 20 years the footfall industry has had a chequered
history with unreliable technologies being offered to the market too early by suppliers genuinely trying to succeed by moving the technologies forward too quickly,” says PFM director Dave Halstead. “This has, at times, dented the confidence in using footfall figures as a KPI, but with each year new technologies arrive and make improvements to the accuracy and reliability of the figures.” Nick Gowens may not have physically given birth to one of the modern-era shopper counter system in the UK 21 years ago, but
May 1994
May 1994
May 1994
June 1994
Belfast centre, Castlecourt, for £90m.
John Laing Developments sold its 350,000 sq ft
Market Walk shopping centre in Chorley was under construction and scheduled to open in April 1995.
at Friern Bridge, North London, had received consent from Barnet Council and three- quarters of the 16 units were let
The £50m non-food and leisure retail park
In June 1994, Britain’s oldest mall, Burlington Arcade, in London’s West End, was up for sale. It was thought that a price of £50m could be obtained.
www.shopping-centre.co.uk March 2011 SHOPPING CENTRE
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