New Delhi, Feb 5: Brick Red, beige, purple or deep maroon. Confused in choosing the right colour to accentuate those lips? Or perplexed in selecting the shirt for the coming Valentine's Day. Or, are you a marketer planning to launch a new cold drink, but at loss in choosing the right flavour? Don't fret. Infosys Technologies can act as your saviour.

Growth in lifestyle and consumer spending has compelled Infosys to develop cutting-edge consumer technology in retail and telecom space. One such technology for the retail space is Smart Visual Merchandising (SVM) based on radio frequency or RFID tags. It has already been deployed on mounted display panels at a retail fashion clothing store inside the Infosys campus in Bangalore.

"Globally, we are conducting seven pilots on all our solutions, primarily in the US and focused on retail, healthcare and cosmetics segment. We are currently talking to Indian retail players for the same as well," said Infosys RFID Pervasive Solutions group head Girish AR.

Here's how the technology works: Passive RFID tags (a small circuit on a paper) each costing about Rs 10 are laid inside shirt or trouser packs. When a potential customer selects a shirt and brings it near a LCD panel, it displays all features of the shirt be it colour name, striped /checked, size, along with other sizes available in the same colour and their prices. The technology comes handy inside a trial room. A touch on a display unit inside the trial orders a bigger/ smaller size at the counter, and a helper can hand over the same, thus saving time for both customer as well as the retailer. A Pantaloon Retail spokesperson told ET, "We have deployed RFID pilots in many of our stores."The technology also helps in building analytics and market research for a product or a brand.

"For instance, if customers spend time at a particular shelf or a product, but don't buy it, the feedback helps generate the consumer response to a particular flavour or colour," adds an Infosys engineer. Retail companies are also gung ho on the use of RFID in retail. For instance, Reliance Retail has developed five RFID-deployment scenarios, which include tracking of reusable crates of fresh food, item and case-level tracking of high-value goods, pallet and case tagging of various goods.

According to sources in Reliance Retail, "Reliance has performed proof-of-concept tests using passive RFID tags to track crates of fresh foods. We recently conducted a pilot involving distribution centre and stores. We are now working with various RFID hardware and tag suppliers to obtain improved read rates for tracking of fresh-food as well as planning a permanent rollout of other scenarios." Some shelves at Pantaloon's Food Bazaar store inside the Infosys campus also carry RFID tags to help build analytical data about a particular flavour, size or price of a product vis a vis it's competitors kept on the same shelf.