Our latest report on Location Intelligence in retail just released, and within, retailers are incredibly candid about how much they want to use location-based technologies. To understand how shoppers move? Yup. To help make store layouts more intuitive? Yes again. But more than anything else, they want to use these solutions to market themselves to consumers on their mobile devices, and this raises a whole host of potential problems. Not least of which are privacy concerns.

However, amidst all this growing desire, retailers are even more challenged to take advantage of location-enabled opportunities today than they were a just a year ago. Look at their responses when asked to self-identify what stands in in their way.

Figure: Time And Understanding Haven’t Made This Any Easier

Source: RSR Research, February 2019

While it’s true that fewer retailers report being constrained by their profitability model, which is based on standardized layouts, the sheer number of increases in the other options we put forth suggests that was but a knee-jerk reaction last year. Retailers are further down the rabbit hole now. As we’ll examine in the Technology Enablers section of the full report (available here), they’re experimenting with location-based solutions much more than they were just last year, and that means that privacy concerns have bubbled up to top of mind as obstacles: as well they should.

No one wants to hear another dissertation about the importance of customer privacy, we get that. But suffice it to say, the more retailers become enamored with using consumers’ location information, the more that issue will present itself. Indeed: its rise in importance to retailers is a signal that they are not only doing more with location information, but that they want to get ahead of potential problems before they turn ugly.

If you don’t have time to read the full report, we’ve also made an abridged eBook for people in a hurry.