The inquisitive eyes of MARI

Thanks to Martin Kingdom, head of English POPAI, his MARI (Marketing at-Retail Initiative) can give us an accurate picture of the effectiveness of our POS activities. It has been an objective of POPAI (The Global Association for Marketing at-Retail) for many years, to get the POS accepted by us as a measurable medium. However, a precondition of this was that an objective and universal index should be invented for POS, like there is for TV, radio or the printed press. It was an exciting challenge to work out an index which is comparable to GRP. MARI measures everything that takes place between customers and POP tools in stores and is not far from being able to read minds. The purpose of MARI is to help in getting sufficient financing for in-store promotional tools. Stores are a form of media and MARI helps us to understand this. MARI uses 4 main tools: 1. Polytrack® video analysis: digital cameras record everything we are interested in inside stores, 2. ClipCam® eye cameras: these are worn by 50-100 customers per store and help to determine the route they follow inside the store, the categories they visit, the in-store media they see and the times spent in different places., 3. Questionnaires: for recording demographic data about participants, 4. DigiTrack®: a special program developed for processing data obtained using the first method. MARI has monitored the movement of 33,704 customers in selected stores within seven days with the utmost precision. Before this, it had also completed a comprehensive in-store audit. MARI sees and tells us what the effect of our messages is, how effective our various POS tools are, how much time is spent shopping etc. MARI can also tell us how our target group is reacting to our efforts. One of the interesting results she has provided is that we only perceive 16.6 per cent of all in-store tools/activities.