The Vending Shopper Science Lab: Deep Learning for Consumer Research

Abstract

To understand human behavior, a fundamental aspect is the analysis of the face and movement. This aspect is particularly important in the context of sales, where to know the shopper also means to guide purchases. A major challenge for vending environment is to predict the shopper behavior, with the aim to influence and increase purchases. In this ambit, vending machine industry is actually an interesting and growing data-driven marketing area of research. In this context, the aim of this paper is to propose an innovative architecture that is able to integrate face and movement understanding in a common strategy for real time consumer modeling. The vending machine and the decision support system process multimedia data to smartly respond with dynamic pricing and product proposal to the particular shopper which is in front of a vending machine. The aim is to build an intelligent vending machine which in real time is able to suitably propose products to a labelled shopper. The results come from real environments vending lab with 30 locations and about 1 million consumers in Italy, and have the aim to demonstrate the good performances and high efficiency of our solution in recognizing the age and the gender of consumer and different interactions with the vending machine.