The Rich Get Smarter with Research
I was wandering through the Wal-Mart shaving aisle and I noticed a screen dangling from the ceiling and positioned over the customers. There was a bright light and a red recording notification the would flash from time to time. 
My first thought was security because the electric shavers are rather expensive so I walked around the store and couldn’t find another setup like this (although there are plenty of security cameras throughout the store).
Then I remembered a New York Times article about video taping customers to understand eye movement, patterns, gender differences and contemplation moments. Seemed like just the spot: There are hyper selection in this area and your eye doesn’t seem to know where to look first.
Cameras are used throughout stores to track shopper movement. For the most part this is just bits of information that are analyzed in the aggregate to make decisions of product placement, service encounters and sales areas. For some, this is a huge invasion of privacy as you are recorded during your decision-making. It’s no different that analyzing click path streams and watching viewer behavior online.
As technology progresses, this video surveillance will only get more and more sophisticated and harder to spot. The large rich companies are doing it now, but it should be used by others: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a video or actual behavior at the point of purchase is worth a ton of words.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.
