This week's Economist has a great article looking at the work supermarkets have done to understand the buying, thinking, and emotional processes of their customers. The article starts with the basics, such as putting bread and milk at the back of the store to make sure that shoppers visit as much of the store as possible, but moves on to cover thinkers such as Damasio.
One of my particular areas of interest has been the electronic wake, so I was interested to read about projects using people's mobiles to track them around a retail centre (without consent) and the growth of the use of RFIDs to track people, products, and behaviour.
There is nothing ground breaking in the article, but it is a great catch-up for anybody who is not regularly involved in researching retail.
