New marketing optimizations are being constantly invented. Since profit is the main inspiration for continuously optimizing sales, there is no telling what a store, online or offline, will do in order to increase margins. There have been plenty of interesting and worrying trends that have popped up over the last few years. As a new approach to optimizations, NEC is now unveiling their innovative facial recognition store marketing software.
It might not sound harmful, but it could possibly intrude on our privacy in a most voyeuristic way. We might soon find ourselves constantly monitored, analyzed and optimized as soon as we set foot inside a store. It is happening on the Internet constantly, but in a more data-ish way of course. When it comes to being treated as a product ourselves, things might just have gone a little bit too far for people. The question is always, how much privacy are you prepared to give up in order to have the best customer service and products available to you?
This store marketing system, dubbed NeoFace, will run on a regular PC connected to a camera. The software as a whole will set you back around $880.00, which by all means should be quite a low risk investment for any store that is looking to increase their profits. This is of course what worries people. If store owners around the world start profiling people through this store marketing software, there no telling how far they would be ready to go in order to increase their margin by a few percentages. So where does the customer come into the picture? Where did using customer service to increase profits go?
NEC’s facial recognition system core will not only serve as a store marketing optimizer, but also in other products such as facial recognition in surveillance products. NeoFace ranked top in USA’s NIST, which should tell you a little about how incredibly powerful this software is. What will turn out to be one of the most important profit increasing softwares of 2013 might also be the software that intrudes the most on your privacy. How do you feel about this? Are you alright with being constantly monitored while shopping, or do you feel creeped out by the voyeuristic approach of mapping out your shopping habits?
NEC’s Store Marketing Software NeoFace
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