Cutting-edge technology shows how well merchandising is working.

Don't look now, but someone is watching you.

Maybe it's the shabbily dressed drifter you ran into in home appliances as you shopped the local department store. Or, maybe it's the dozen or so video cameras that are bolted to the wall at various points throughout the store.

Don't be alarmed. The shabby guy isn't there to take your wallet and the man behind the camera isn't "Big Brother." They only are observing your shopping behavior.

It's all part of a move by some retailers to track customers as they move through their stores.

Traffic pattern

Georganne Bender is a retail consultant and co-founder of consulting firm Kizer and Bender. Bender, along with her business partner, Rich Kizer, frequently advises store owners on how to create a store layout that is easy to navigate. She says it's a mistake for retailers simply to place products in their store in random order.

This diagram shows customer movement around a store. The darkest shading (black) indicates the lowest traffic, reaching into the furthest corners of the store and crossing the aisles. The lightest shading shows the highest traffic — from yellow at the front door through red and lavender to the right of the door and down the main aisle to blue down the principal aisles among the shelves. Heat maps such as this are specialized and expensive and are used primarily for pilot stores or where stores are testing new ideas.

"Good retailers absolutely do not leave merchandising to chance," she said. "It's something that they're thinking about and it's something that evolves every day. And it's not something that customers dictate to them. It's vice versa."

Retail cartographers

How can a store map its traffic patterns? Industry leaders say there are a variety of methods.

"The most efficient way is to put an observer in to note the patterns of people — the way that people enter the store and go through — on a sampling basis," said Eugene Fram, a marketing professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Philip Saunders College of Business.

Some companies offer a more high-tech approach when it comes to mapping customer traffic patterns. David Smyth is vice president of sales and operations for Experian FootFall, a company that uses strategically placed video cameras to record customers' actions, develop headcounts and map traffic routes accordingly.

"What you're trying to do is look for hot and cold spots — areas of high density of traffic," Smyth said.

Once the current traffic pattern has been identified, Smyth says retailers can try modifying the layout of their store to increase sales.

Warren Brown is director of marketing for IntelliVid Corp., another company that uses cameras and video intelligence software to gauge traffic patterns for retailers.

"What we find folks typically want to do with the video intelligence is use it to really diagnose why things are selling and why they are not selling," Brown said. "How effective is a new display? We do that in a couple of ways. One is relating the traffic by that end cap to the overall store traffic."

Brown explained that if 1,000 people came into a store on a given day, maybe 200 of them passed by that end cap. Brown's software allows retailers to know how many people got close enough to the end cap to pick up a displayed item from that shelf. Further, the software lets retailers analyze how many of the 200 who passed that endcap stopped and lingered in front of it.

Traffic laws

Consumers on foot, like drivers of motor vehicles, adhere to certain rules or patterns. It helps to identify these rules when designing a store.

Customers on foot, like drivers of motor vehicles, adhere to certain rules or patterns. It helps to identify these rules when designing a store.

For example, research conducted by noted industry expert Paco Underhill has suggested that, when given a choice, the vast majority of consumers will turn right after entering a store. That research was explained in detail in Underhill's book, "Why We Buy, The Science of Shopping.

"Other research points to a psychological barrier that exists approximately 15 feet within the front door of a box retailer. Dubbed "the decompression zone," in this space it is rare for an ad or product to catch the eye of entering consumers, according to Bender.

"We were in a store last week where they had a pretty jam-packed decompression zone, including this sign where they talked about how they were this national award-winning store," she said.

When Bender and the store owner counted the number of people who stopped to look the sign and other things in that area, the owner realized that, although they had many wonderful things there, the sales on those products were not good, people were not signing up for programs advertised there, nor were they even reading the signs — because they never saw them.

The area just beyond the decompression zone, on the other hand, is a prime location for what Bender calls "speed bumps" — hot products and cool displays that get the customer's attention and slow down their movement through the store.

Beyond that, the Rochester Institute of Technology's Fram says stores should take a lesson from the culture and create store layouts that facilitate a quick traverse.

"The other view is that people live time-compressed lifestyles these days," Fram said. "They're busy with their jobs, their families, their friends and they want the retail experience to be as quick as possible. So that calls for a traffic pattern that allows you to get through the store most quickly because you don't want to frustrate the time-compressed customer."

He says big-box grocery stores such as Meijer learned this lesson when, instead of making the consumer walk all the way to the back of the store for milk, it created a refrigerated shelf for milk near the front of the store.

Traffic penalties

Just as drivers can face serious penalties if they disregard traffic regulations, retailers who don't pay attention to shoppers' traffic patterns can wind up suffering.

Brown says retailers who don't identify and act on shopper behavior ultimately will lose dollars.

"The risk is that you say sales are down, but you don't know the right lever to pull," he said. "So you end up either taking too long to figure out which lever to pull or consistently pulling the wrong ones, and as a result, losing sales and losing market."

Bender agrees, adding that the store that has identified its traffic patterns is a store that can respond quickly to changes in customer behavior.

"When you get a blueprint like that, you have a discipline and you know that you need to change the speed bumps at least every two weeks. You need to change your end caps monthly. You need to change your lifestyle displays at least once a month. You need to change your windows at least once a month," she said.

"So it sort of holds your feet to the fire and you know you have deadlines and when you have to change things."