Do Exceptional Retail Experiences Actually Drive Profit?

Designed for retail leaders and lovers alike, Retail Refined explores the in-store technology of the future, challenges the industry’s preconceived notions, and brings together retail’s biggest names to understand the brand strategies that will define the next decade in retail.

 

Customer experience is a priority for any retail space. Understanding their behaviors and identifying opportunities helps brands maximize those experiences. Companies that do this take this spatial intelligence and can accurately attribute ROI to efforts. Discussing this technology innovation, Retail Refined host Melissa Gonzalez spoke with Ken Jackowitz, Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of TideSmart. TideSmart is an experiential agency with expertise in designing wellness solutions, retail spaces, and experience analytics.

“The insights business focuses on space utilization and helping clients post-COVID think differently about space and maximize for the time of day or how people are behaving,” Jackowitz explained.

One of the biggest gaps in spatial marketing or merchandising is knowing the ROI. To understand this, you have to examine the behavior of the people as they come into contact with it.

“In traditional retail merchandising, what’s the value of the end cap? You don’t know how many people were looking at it but didn’t buy it. Was it the wrong product? Presentation? Spatial intelligence solutions close the gap.” – Ken Jackowitz

How this works without becoming a cost burden is by using the existing infrastructure of cameras. They can collect the data, which then gets uploaded to the cloud, where AI processes it.

One thing this can help with is grouping customers. “In a grocery store, there are traffic counters, but it’s not a one-to-one usually. There are families, and they are a grouping, which may change your staffing and inventory,” Jackowitz noted.

Another aspect of the technology is face-to-face AI. It’s like taking the recorded call center conversation to a live space. “The last mile is the conversation between two people. You can capture these key moments of truth and provide them in a dashboard to a customer. AI calls out areas of opportunity like retraining a subset of people,” Jackowitz shared.

Listen to Previous Episodes of Retail Refined Right Here!

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Twitter – @MarketScale
Facebook – facebook.com/marketscale
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/company/marketscale

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

beauty
Building Beauty for Real Women: Why Brands Must Focus on Longevity, Not Hype
March 25, 2026

Walk into any beauty aisle—or scroll through your feed for five minutes—and it’s clear the industry is obsessed with what’s new. New formulas, new trends, new “rules.” But for many women, especially those who’ve been using makeup for decades, the question isn’t what’s new—it’s what actually works. And increasingly, the answer isn’t coming from the…

Read More
Physician
Fixing the Physician Experience: Why Advocacy Is Healthcare’s Next Frontier
March 25, 2026

Physician burnout has become a defining challenge in healthcare, with research showing that a substantial portion of clinicians—anywhere from roughly a quarter to over half—experience emotional exhaustion, driven more by systemic pressures like administrative burden and reduced autonomy than by individual resilience alone. As healthcare systems face growing staffing shortages and rising patient demand, the…

Read More
career
From Starting Over In A New Country To Reaching The C-Suite: A CFO’s Career Comeback
March 25, 2026

Global mobility is reshaping the modern workforce, with millions of professionals relocating each year in pursuit of opportunity, stability, or growth. Yet behind the headlines of talent migration lies a quieter, more difficult truth: restarting a career from scratch—even after years of success—is far more common than people expect. In fact, many skilled immigrants…

Read More
AI in school
How AI is Changing the Safeguarding Landscape
March 24, 2026

This episode of “Safeguarding in Focus,” hosted by Sam Eustace, features Lucie Welch, an expert in primary education and safeguarding from Services for Education. The discussion centers on how AI is transforming the safeguarding landscape in schools, exploring both the risks and opportunities presented by this rapidly evolving technology. Key takeaways: Schools must address…

Read More