An emerging mobile technology, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons enable smartphones apps to pinpoint their exact location, indoor or outdoor, with a level of accuracy down to a few centimetres. The signal from a beacon can be used to trigger a specific app notification relevant to that location and time. Beacons are inexpensive, small and often battery-powered devices that can be discreetly placed in retail, entertainment, hospitality, transport, healthcare, outdoor media and private locations to enable a wide variety of use cases. Diagram 1 shows some examples of how beacons can be used in a retail context.
Diagram 1, source Appflare
Beacons help app developers to engage consumers at the right place and time, pushing out relevant information and content, rather than requiring the consumer to search for offers, payments details, tickets or loyalty cards. Note, in some cases an app may need to use a cellular or Wi-Fi connection to display the appropriate content, while in other cases, the relevant content may already be cached within the app. Beacons can also give app developers greater insight into consumers’ behaviour, for example, by enabling them to track the typical path through a store or dwell time at a particular product.

Care should be taken to ensure that beacons do not over prompt apps to deliver notifications that are too frequent, intrusive or irrelevant. The risk is that consumers will disable notifications or Bluetooth, or even delete apps if they do not feel they are being given value. The table below shows the main strengths of Bluetooth beacons and some important considerations relating to their usage. There is also a barrier here to consumers just switching on Bluetooth and trusting that they are not being unknowingly (in the background) interrogated to obtain information or data that they are not willing to share with 3rd parties.