Guiding Lights

The huge Carrefour supermarket in Lille, France, was among the first retail stores to embrace a new and promising weapon against the Amazon effect – consumers’ growing preference for online shopping over brick-and-mortar stores. 

In an effort to enhance the in-store shopping experience, the supermarket installed about 1.55 miles of light-emitting diode (LED) lights that essentially created a storewide GPS system, guiding customers to items on their shopping lists and promotional specials and offering them coupons as they approach certain items in the aisle. This LED-based indoor positioning system was developed by Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, and aims to provide customers and retailers with a more interactive and personalized shopping experience. 

Each luminaire sends out a unique code that is detectable by any smart device that has a camera, a concept known as visible light communication (VLC). The camera reads the code and detects its location within the store. A mobile app then delivers location-specific promotions to the shopper or guides them to the precise areas where the items they want are stocked. The app can show customers whether a product is positioned on their right or left, and product locations are accurate to within several inches.

“In the past, stores have used beacon technology to identify product locations, but it wasn’t precise enough,” said Bruno Campesi, National Account Manager for Retail at Signify. “A beacon might be accurate to within three to five feet, so you might not even be in the right aisle. But with visible light communication, the accuracy jumps exponentially.”

An app supported by VLC technology can learn about a customer’s buying habits over time, so if they normally buy potato chips but skipped them on their trip through the aisle, the app could send them a push notification reminding them to pick up their favorite snack. Not only is the store saving money by using highly energy-efficient LEDs, but its lighting system is actually driving revenue through product promotion.

For customers who input a shopping list into the app, the VLC system can show them the shortest route through the store to get them in and out quickly. The store can also collect data on the most common routes customers take through its aisles and can adjust its product displays and store layout accordingly to maximize sales. VLC technology can promote better customer service as well. Through the app, a customer could signal for a store employee to come to their location to answer a question about a product, help them reach an item on the top shelf or pick up a heavy item.

The VLC system helps to address another issue for retail stores: the increasing popularity of online ordering for in-store pickup. If a new employee charged with picking these orders isn’t sure where each item is located, the extra time spent searching the store’s layout can really eat into a retailer’s profit margin. VLC technology can streamline order-picking by guiding employees to products on their list and allowing them to program several orders into the app to be picked at once. 

“Every store needs to have lighting anyway, so converting lighting infrastructure into an indoor positioning system really is a game-changer for facilities managers,” Campesi said. “There are all types of added value when they introduce this type of technology into their stores to improve the shopping experience.”

Ron Farmer, Chief Executive of US LED Ltd., a manufacturer of commercial and industrial LED lighting, said the increased energy efficiency and affordability of LEDs has led many retailers to retrofit their existing stores with LED lighting. Since companies now typically recoup their investment in LEDs within a year or two through energy savings, many retailers are upgrading to LEDs even amid uncertainty about the future viability of their brick-and-mortar locations. 

Here are three technological advances with LEDs that Farmer expects to pay dividends for retailers:

• Daylight harvesting – At stores that get a lot of natural light, LED fixtures near windows and skylights can be fitted with sensors to detect sunlight and dim themselves accordingly, providing more uniform lighting throughout the store and increasing energy savings. 

• Safety and security enhancements – LEDs can be programmed to display safety messages whenever the store loses power and the backup power supply is initiated. An LED might project an arrow onto the floor to direct customers and employees to the nearest exit, for example. In addition, if motion is detected within a store after business hours, LEDs can be programmed to flash on and off rapidly or strobe in a disorienting pattern to encourage a thief to flee.

• Ornate organic LED fixtures – Organic LEDs are becoming increasingly popular and will allow retailers to light stores in creative ways. In organic LEDs, the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light in response to an electric current. Organic LEDs are used to create digital displays in devices such as television screens, computer monitors, mobile phones and handheld game consoles. But the thin sheets of organic LEDs also will allow for edge lighting of glass or plastic fixtures, so a store could hang a decorative piece of glass from the ceiling that emits light from its trim, giving the fixture an ultramodern look. 

 “You can have organic LEDs in sheets that are as thin as a piece of paper and are flexible, so you can bend it or put it in a circle,” Farmer said. “I think that’s going to be one of the things we see in the future – a lot of creativity in lighting we never thought was possible before.”

By: Nick Fortuna