Digimarc Publishes Quantitative Model Estimating Potential Labor Cost Savings For Retailers Who Adopt Digimarc Barcode

White Paper and ROI Calculator Help Retailers Estimate Return on Investment from Adopting Digimarc Barcode

Digimarc Corporation recently published “Digimarc Barcode: A Quantitative Model of Annual Labor Cost Savings and Return on Investment for Retailers.” The white paper and associated ROI (return on investment) Calculator are intended to help retailers quantify potential labor cost savings from adopting the Digimarc Barcode. The quantitative model focuses on the top 120 global high-volume retailers and projects that this group could realize aggregate labor cost savings in excess of $500M annually for a single item per minute (IPM) improvement in scanning speed at checkout. The white paper, quantitative model, and ROI Calculator are available at www.digimarc.com/model.

The Digimarc Barcode is a high-performance digital watermark-based barcode enhancement. It greatly improves speed of checkout – and occupies no space on the package. The Digimarc Barcode repetitively encodes the same data currently carried in the product’s traditional barcode symbol invisibly over the entire surface of packages and labels. This means that cashiers, as well as shoppers using self-checkout, can quickly scan items without having to find and position the barcode toward the reader, creating opportunities for improving retailers’ margins and customer satisfaction.

“Potential labor cost savings are a quantifiable benefit of adopting the Digimarc Barcode,” said Ed Knudson, executive vice president, sales and marketing at Digimarc. “High-volume retailers focus on IPM as a key performance measurement, and the IPM improvements we’re seeing in our internal testing could translate into billions of dollars in savings across the industry.”

Digimarc’s ROI Calculator was designed for use by retailers to estimate potential savings from a reduction in cashier labor costs due to faster processing at checkout. The ROI Calculator is available to the public in spreadsheet format, allowing for inputs of different assumptions and experience data to estimate the ROI from adopting the Digimarc Barcode.

The white paper describes the model structure, assumptions, and sources of data, including a hypothetical example of a retailer with $10 billion in annual sales of which 25 percent is comprised of private label brands. In this scenario, adoption of the Digimarc Barcode is estimated to deliver a 5-year ROI of more than 275 percent by enabling private label products alone, and more than 1200 percent assuming adoption by all brands in the stores.

The Digimarc Barcode is the latest feature in the Digimarc Discover optimization of the Shopper’s Journey. Other aspects of Digimarc Discover allow mobile-centric shoppers to automatically identify brand impressions in and out of stores, connect automatically to engaging content provided by the associated brands, and allow users to add their interest in the product to an activity list.

Digimarc welcomes feedback aimed at improving the model and key assumptions that it relies upon. The model contains many assumptions based on limited publicly available data. Improvements to the model and associated ROI Calculator are expected to play an important role in facilitating procurement decisions of retailers, and informing resource allocations of Digimarc retailers, and suppliers.

About Digimarc Corporation
Digimarc Corporation , based in Beaverton, Oregon, is a leading innovator and provider of consumer engagement, media management, and security solutions that create digital identities for all forms of media and many everyday objects. Digimarc’s digital IDs are imperceptible to humans and enable computers, networks and devices like mobile phones to better "see, hear and understand" brand impressions and other objects of interest. Digimarc has built an extensive intellectual property portfolio with patents in digital watermarking, content identification and management, media and object discovery to enable ubiquitous computing and related technologies. Digimarc develops solutions, licenses its intellectual property, and provides development services to business partners across a range of industries. For more information, visit www.digimarc.com And www.digimarc.com/barcode#video.