Analyzing the Correlation of People Flow and Sales Using a Large Number of People Counters Installed in a Shopping Complex

Analyzing people flow brings great benefits in diverse domains. When managing a shopping complex, it is certainly important to consider marketing strategies to improve overall sales. Many studies have been conducted on people flow, and most of them are targeted either at large-scale analysis, such as for city planning, or small-scale analysis, such as for crowd management of a small space. Therefore, those studies are not applicable to a mid-scale analysis, such as for a shopping complex. In this paper, we propose two novel methods: one for measuring people flow of a shopping complex and one to analyze and visualize the correlation between people flow and sales over the entire facility. Furthermore, we applied the two methods in a real-world shopping complex at the center of Tokyo to verify the effectiveness of our methods. Specifically, we installed more than 50 people counters in three shopping malls, collected people flow data over a year, and analyzed correlation between the people flow data and sales data over the floors of the entire facility. By visualizing the correlation between people flow and sales as heat maps, the proposed methods successfully revealed that business knowledge on people flow and sales, which is empirically believed, is true and will be of great use in shopping complex management.