The presentation of a product in a retail space can significantly impact its commercial success. Factors such as height of the product in the gondola or rack and positioning of the product with respect to other products may be influencing factors in attracting the consumer's attention to the product, and ultimately in leading the consumer to make a purchasing decision.
Generally, products are displayed arranged in a retail space using product display apparatus such as cabinets, gondolas, wall shelving, carousels, hooks, racks, and any type of equipment which may be suitable for the display of a product depending on the properties and/or requirements of the product. Certain products, for example, require refrigeration. Some products may be presented in specially designed gondolas or displays, particularly during special promotions.
A retailer may make use of planograms, i.e., graphic representations of the retail space, to create a layout of a particular retail space, such as a cabinet or a wall rack, showing the proposed location of each product. Planograms may be created by retailer staff or by the product manufacturers themselves. The planograms are subsequently used by staff to arrange products accordingly.
Product display areas in retail stores are generally subjected to uniform lighting, therefore the lighting may not be the optimum lighting for each product stocked on a shelf. A product display area may be fitted with a particular lighting without regard to the effect the lighting has on the overall product presentation. Setting up customized lighting that better portrays each product or group of products can be a cumbersome and time-consuming task, particularly considering the fast-changing nature of retail. That is, products may be removed from a store's offering, new products arrive, or packaging of existing products is redesigned.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,164,274 provides LED lighting integrated in a product display apparatus. Product display locations of the product display apparatus may be lighted individually with an individualized lighting by corresponding control of product display light sources. The color and/or intensity of the individual lighting are adapted to the color of the particular product or its package at a predetermined product display location. With such configuration, specific light signals can be directed to a product, providing a high control of a consumer's attention towards a signaled product may to assist in the attention selection of consumer's eyes, and therefore the consumer's attention.
The system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,164,274 is intended to cause optimum use of the human visual possibilities in a shopping environment. The amount of information offered to the human eye in a shop is vast, and anyway surpasses the amount of information that can be absorbed in the human brain in the short period of shopping. Thus, the shopkeeper should control the presentation of products, e.g. based on available profiles of consumers during a certain day or time of day. With such profile information, selected products may be brought to the attention of the consumers. This implies that some products or product groups should be promoted differently in the course of a day or days. To enable this, a traditional approach of manually applying e.g. banners or stickers and/or changing pricing information is insufficient or outright impossible, in particular in shops having thousands of articles. In some shops, different suppliers of different products may have access to the shops to manage promotion of their own products, which leads to many parties being active in a shop, and trying to obtain some of the consumer's attention.